


quod zonam soluit diu ligatam

by hypocorism



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Background Relationships, Hair Braiding, Hand Feeding, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Love is paying attention, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Persephone Goes Willingly With Hades (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Russian Mythology, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 12:43:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20228047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypocorism/pseuds/hypocorism
Summary: Nicke does not eat anything because he knows the rules. Alex offers but does not press, and Nicke does not find himself hungry.Not until later.





	quod zonam soluit diu ligatam

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted on thesinbin: https://thesinbin.dreamwidth.org/3790.html?thread=5220814#cmt5220814
> 
> Warnings: bg of the fic deals with grieving the death of a parent, also generally this is a myth retelling about the personification of death so death is a large conceptual theme and most of the characters are technically dead, abstracted references to suicidal ideation
> 
> Additional tags: there are a couple established background relationships (andre burakovsky/jakub vrana/dmitrij jaskin and sasha semin/evgeny kuznetsov), but neither of them come in enough imo for tags
> 
> Sasha = Alexander Semin; Alex = Alexander Ovechkin
> 
> Literally infinite thanks to EJ who is the best hand holder slash beta reader anyone could ask for!! Huge thanks to itsahockeynight for the help also, you’re both incredible.
> 
> Also somewhat inspired by Wade’s tweet about a nickeovi tangled au, obviously.
> 
> Playlist:  
https://open.spotify.com/user/ew7urpqs0vz9nnk5selku185n/playlist/6wphvi5ua1g5aPC2L7YKnv?si=JnPCLKhjTDWyhwMbeV2ppQ

The concentration of people with at least a little magic in their blood is unsurprisingly high at the library where Nicke works, the big one in the center of the city. It's mostly people with a great-aunt or a grandmother who was just a little strange, or hedge-witches, and then a few whose magic is powerful but limited to the care and keeping of magical texts.

Nicke had thought, moving here, that it would be easier to blend in. It's a big city, bigger than he’s ever lived in, with a long and voluminous, if not particularly complex, history of magic. It wouldn't be like college, he hoped, where people gave him weird looks over perfectly mundane things like flowers turning toward Nicke when he walked across campus, or the way light would get trapped in his hair on overcast days.

It wouldn't be like home either, but that was a good thing, in some ways.

What he hadn't considered carefully enough was this. Little magical flares, where his blood runs too close to the surface and flickertwists the world against his skin to fit, those don't stand out. Those, like his tea always being the perfect temperature or the way he can smell the rain three days out, are understandable, unremarkable. The problem is, even a witch's great-granddaughter without so much as a fingernail's worth of her own magic can recognize power when she sees it, and no one could mistake Nicke for a hedge-witch.

So he tries to be careful, all the while wondering what the point is of being careful here instead of being careful somewhere else. He had thought, leaving school, that going somewhere bigger, somewhere with a little more magic, would be enough. That it would kill, finally and completely, the nagging hangnail-feeling of missing somewhere he can’t go back to. But the dregs of magic collecting in corners around the library and clinging to the most-used books like cobwebs just makes him hungrier for it, and less easily satisfied.

And then, there’s Sasha. Sasha, with his gangly limbs and his strange, moldable face, is supposedly the children’s librarian. He’s one of them anyway, although he’ll disappear for weeks at a time and no one seems particularly bothered about it. This does not, necessarily, mean anything. There are a lot of strange people at this particular library. There are a lot of strange people in this particular city, this land, and many unusual places. There are a lot of kinds of magic all criss-crossing over each other. That is some of the reason why Nicke left the place he was originally from and came to this land. Magic here is older, and wilder, growing up in between cracks in the pavement and lurking in dark corners. Gods here do not stay neatly above everything in the same way, not always.

Not unheard of is not the same thing as common, though, and while people here might be familiar enough with divinity not to gawk at it, that does not mean Nicke goes unmarked. There is a certain strangeness unique to something displaced, something not where it should be. It is a strangeness which invites deferral, that encourages those who are in exactly the place they are supposed to be to look away. People do not seem to be able to look right at Sasha, or right at Nicke. Their eyes slide away, down.

Nicke does not like being stared at. It’s why he started covering his hair, why he wears only dark colors, why he left the place he was born. He likes even less, though, the mingled combination of fear and awe that drapes around him like a mantle here, where people know enough to avert their eyes.

Sasha is cloaked in that same strangeness, the wary recognition that something closer to divine than human is walking about pretending to be nothing much at all. This would be enough to make Nicke curious, because it’s been a long time since he’s had anyone arguably close to a peer.

There is curious and then there is incautious, though, and what pushes Nicke perilously close to the latter is that Sasha, unlike Nicke, does not seem to have the accompanying self-consciousness. He doesn’t seem to care what people think of him, if they look at him or not, if they fear him or love him. Even Nicke. That stings his pride a little, and makes him envious. Sasha is seemingly happy, surrounded only by children who are too young to understand what death is, and thus too young to fear it.

So, it leaves Nicke with this: he is tired of being careful, and tired of being unhappy. Nicke is not a fool, but he knows the measure of his own wisdom and sometimes that comes to the same thing.

It leaves Nicke with this: he isn’t exactly following Sasha. It’s more like, he has an idea, where he thinks Sasha is going. He wants to see if he’s correct.

There is, running not quite through town, what could generously be described as a path. It goes from the library down out of the center of town, twisting around the back of several buildings before ending up in a more or less straight shot to the north cemetery. The north cemetery is big and overgrown and dark, with trees that are not quite tame and ivy clinging to most of the stones. It’s surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, which is tall and imposing but terrible at keeping anything out, the bars are set so wide.

The path goes right through an opening twenty feet from the gate, where one of the bars is missing and the resulting gap is big enough for a person to squeeze through. A person, but not really Sasha and definitely not Nicke. He’s fairly certain the only way Sasha gets through is via some sort of magic. Nicke waits a while and then takes the gate, wincing at the loud creaking noise it makes. He has no affinity for metals, but he glares disapprovingly at the hinges anyway.

He finds Sasha again fairly easily, because the path is more worn-in here. Nicke has never actually gone into this cemetery. There is a lot of magic, and just getting within sight of the gate was enough to make him nauseous. The magic in Nicke’s blood is for growing things, mostly. He can touch, a little, sunshine and rain, other things kin to the earth, but they are peripheral to his domain.

He doesn’t particularly like burial grounds. There’s too much in them, all that decay and decomposition feeding layers upon layers of plants and animals. The air gets thick with growth, soupy, sliding along his skin in an unpleasant caress. Life and death mix together in a confusing jangle in a cemetery; there’s so much magic in them that Nicke feels drowned out, like he can’t hear himself think.

This cemetery, even more so than the library, has the most magic of anywhere in town, loud and screaming with the thickly knotted threads of it. It makes sense that Sasha would come here if, as Nicke suspects, Sasha is what he thinks he is.

Sasha is a little uncanny, certainly, but that isn't what tips Nicke off to him being semi-divine, or to what exactly he is. It's something like this: places Sasha has been, places he has not gone yet, maintain, for a little while, an impression of him. As if he is still there. As if he is there already. He does not stay, neatly contained, in the present.

And, when you do see him, there is something a little difficult about perceiving him. A thing which makes you look more closely if you are paying attention, if you know to pay attention to those sorts of things. A thing which makes you stop trying if you are not paying attention, and if magic does not zing along your nerves like the unexpected brush of fingers in the dark.

Sasha is not present and not past and not future, but all three at once, in varying quantities, and Nicke knows that that means death. Life is many things, but always in order, and death is nothing so much as the dissolution of time and the order it brings.

Nicke stands in the shade of an enormous angel, its face streaked and worn by age and rain. He watches Sasha weave through the trees, again or maybe still. The northwest corner of the cemetery is the oldest, with names worn off more than half the stones and trees and underbrush tangling and clutching so densely that it’s difficult to walk through.

Sasha moves effortlessly, ducking around and under the clutching branches following a path of his own making. Past the iron of the gate and burrowing deep into the glut of life inside, it is easier for Nicke to follow quietly and without being seen. The earth obeys his command for silence, roots and branches drawing aside to let him pass and brushing against the trailing hem of his jacket as they slip back into place.

They come, suddenly, into a clearing, and Nicke lingers in the shadow of a gigantic yew tree as he watches Sasha step out into the open.

It is dark here, and Nicke can barely see the stone arch in the gloom, but that does not matter much. This is what he expected, and the mere outline of its bulk in the darkness is enough to confirm his suspicions.

There is a brief flash of white, color leeching from everything in one hungry gulp, and Sasha disappears through the gate.

Nicke stares at the place where Sasha was, and will be again, and slips one curl loose from where it’s tucked under his beanie. He turns to go.

—-

There are stories about the god of death, anywhere you look, if you turn over enough rocks, burrow under enough leaves. Death resides anywhere life is, two sides of the same coin. It’s the eternal fascination of the temporal, the change from seen to unseen.

When Nicke was young, his mother would take him deep into the forest and show him how to press his hands into the soil. There, always, was so much life struggling toward her palms, earthworms and roots wriggling their way with desperate speed. Nicke was never as strong, never drew attention in quite the same way.

Maybe that was for the best. Gods live a long time, but not always, and not forever, and if life is fascinated by death, there is nothing death desires so much as life. Where his mother went, Nicke could not follow, and he was left only with a handful of whispers to guide him: about being special, about the earth and what is under it, and about honoring the weight of others.

This land is far away from where he buried his mother, and the gods that live here are strange to Nicke.

There is a story, about a girl who hid from death. Magic does not follow neat lines, but worship creates boundaries of influence, to an extent. The place you are born is the place you are supposed to die, the place to which you return once you have left behind your body. Mortal lives are not long enough, usually, for the god of death in whose domain they were born to lose track of them. Gods, usually, do not leave behind the place they came into being. Not in life, and certainly not in death.

But there is a story, nonetheless, about a girl who hid from death. She was wise, wise enough to keep an eye on her own shadow, to keep her name to herself, to tuck in the trailing edges of herself so they wouldn’t catch on a nail. She lived long and well, in many different places, and did not belong to any of them. The underworld in which the thread of her life spun out was a busy one, and large, and no one noticed her thread growing and growing, pooling over the bounds of its spindle. Not for a long time.

Eventually, of course, death came to find her. She was clever, though, clever enough to challenge death to a game, and to win. And so, she got for herself a second allotment of life, by wisdom, and a third, by cleverness.

The story ends many ways: she is living still, she tired and went to her rest in the place she was born, she came into an entirely different kingdom of the dead and there gained dominion, she became a god, she became young again, but somewhere else. Maybe it is possible, to hide from death indefinitely. It seems, from stories, that that is what the wise do, and the clever.

There are stories about the god of death, everywhere you look, and sometimes death is cruel and sometimes kind and sometimes neither or both. Sometimes death is merely inexorable.

Nicke did not leave the place that he was born to hide from the god of death. He left because the weight of his own divinity had grown so heavy from inheritance that he could no longer bear to stand under it. He left because the gate to the underworld, there, was solid as a stone wall against him. Nicke is not wise enough to wish for a life measured in century rather than year, merely unfortunate enough to have been born to it.

It is foolish, perhaps, to go and court death, but Nicke is a deity of life, and such foolishness is a natural weakness of such beings. He could not approach his own death, in his own lands, but the death which resides here is a different creature altogether.

—-

He does not approach the gate, not yet. Instead he goes home, and goes to sleep, and when he goes to work the next morning he does not watch Sasha.

This, of course, turns out to be a mistake.

Nicke is having his lunch in the small break room up on the third floor, tucked between the local plant life and history of magical tool use sections. He usually prefers to eat outside, but it’s sunny today and the little outdoor area is crowded with people. No one uses this break room much, it doesn’t have a microwave and the refrigerator is inexplicably full of bottles of Gatorade that no one will drink. Nicke is fairly certain they’re cursed. Not seriously enough to warrant removal, just enough to give everyone a vague sense of unease. It’s the perfect place to avoid his co-workers. Usually.

Sasha doesn’t bother with an opening line, just pulls out the seat across from Nicke and drops into it. Nicke keeps eating his lunch. This was not intended to be confrontational, but Sasha seems to take it that way.

“You’re not very good at taking hints, are you?” Sasha asks, irritably.

“Apparently not,” Nicke says, focusing on unearthing a walnut from the depths of his salad, “since I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” Sasha makes an aggrieved noise, and then jerks Nicke’s bowl away when Nicke doesn’t look up at him. He wants a reaction, so Nicke absolutely refuses to give it to him. “That was rude,” Nicke says mildly.

“I’ve stuck to our agreement so far,” Sasha says. “Don’t make me regret that.”

“We don’t have any agreement,” Nicke says, taking his lunch back. Sasha pauses at this, and Nicke takes another bite of his salad. It’s a particularly good one.

“Are you disingenuous or just stupid?” and there is something in his voice, now, that is entirely inhuman. It makes Nicke smile, although he is not foolish enough to do so openly. “You don’t belong here.”

“Neither do you,” Nicke points out.

Sasha leans back in his chair, eyeing Nicke thoughtfully. “I am a guide. I belong many places.” Nicke simply shrugs at this, since any response he might make would reveal too much. Sasha leans forward, tapping the table. “Don’t follow me again. Don’t go near the threshold.”

Having said his piece, Sasha departs, leaving Nicke much to think about.

He is fairly certain, in any case, that Sasha only realized he was being followed after the fact. Nicke was careful to avoid being seen, but perhaps not considerate enough about the trail he was leaving through the cemetery as he departed.

Perhaps he _is_ being a little disingenuous. Nicke is not stupid. He knows Sasha had marked his coming, regardless of the impression of indifference. Perhaps, after all, he had entered into a feigned mutual ignorance by virtue of his own inaction. Perhaps he has changed the terms of that agreement now, by trespassing so nearly upon Sasha’s domain.

Perhaps, the lack of care he took in leaving the cemetery was not so accidental, after all.

It’s getting later in the year, and closer to fall, and the beanie he wears to cover his hair is growing less conspicuous by the day. Even in the dead of summer it gets less stares than when he goes bare-headed. His hair has gotten long, uncut until the coming of some new sorrow, and even looped and braided it catches and holds the light and shimmers bright with magic.

Nicke slips off his beanie, and tucks it into his pocket, and goes back to work.

—-

Nicke, less a fool than he has been behaving, waits until he is certain Sasha is elsewhere to go back to the cemetery.

He uncovers his hair, once he’s deep enough in the trees that no one will be able to see it, and tucks his beanie away. It doesn’t always glow, he can mute it if he so desires, and keeping it pinned up hems the magic in somewhat. It also gives him a slight headache, so he tends to let it down as soon as he gets home from work. For now, he just unwraps the length of the braid, breathing in the density of life around him and allowing the natural radiance to light his way.

Nicke tries to step through the archway first. He doesn’t expect it to work, and it doesn’t. While that was all Sasha needed to do, Sasha is a creature of that realm and would be quickly recognized and accepted by its magic. Nicke, on the other hand, is something strange and foreign. Still, there has to be _something_.

There are marks on the arch, old and eroded, but Nicke doesn’t recognize any of them. The magic is so loud, all across this whole plot of land, that it’s not particularly helpful as far as navigation goes. It does seem to be more concentrated here than elsewhere in the cemetery, but that Nicke already knew from following Sasha. He runs a careful hand over the arch, thinking, and then looks around the clearing.

_It’s so dark_, Nicke thinks, impatient, and unties the end of his braid. He combs his fingers through his hair, shaking it out and letting it fall over his shoulders and back. The darkness of the clearing retreats a little, and, Nicke feels a short sharp dart of triumph, the light catches on something.

Nicke gets closer, bending to peer down at the ground. There, yellow and bright in the light of his hair, is a single jonquil flower. Nicke kneels beside it, letting his hair fall around and curtain it. He puts a hand on the stem, and then hesitates.

_Don’t go near the threshold,_ Sasha repeats in Nicke’s head, and irritation surges down Nicke’s arms and into the tips of his fingers. He pinches down on the stem of the flower and plucks it.

This time, when he approaches the gateway, it opens for him.

The passage into the underworld is dark and long, winding its way down into the earth. The magic of it is strange to Nicke. The entrance felt almost stifling, thick with the heavy buzzing of growth and decay. Once he passed though the gate, though, the feel of the air around him changed entirely. It is light against his skin, faint and caressing as a sea breeze. It feels like the thin whisper of pages between his fingers, as fine as sand and as quiet as footsteps upon moss. He continues downward, through and out of the long tunnel and out onto a quay.

It is deserted, and with a surge of disappointment Nicke sees all the boats are on the far side of the river. Nicke leans against a wooden post, staring across the water. The bed of the river is so broad he can barely see anything, just the bobbing of the ferry and a vast darkness beyond.

He leans over the water, far enough above that just the tips of his hair trail in the water. Thin spiraling lines of gold starts to spin out from the points where the water and his hair meet, and Nicke tugs it up and out of the river quickly. The gold dissipates, and he sighs in relief.

There is nothing much else to see. A long shoreline, covered in a thick pebbled sand, the quay, the lapping of the black water, and the underworld somewhere in the invisible distance. Nicke runs a hand along a few of the empty posts, set against the waterfront for the tying of boats, but the wood is so long dead that it tells him nothing. With one final look across the water, he reluctantly turns to go.

Nicke goes up and out, back into the sunlight, and that should be the end of things. It should, but he has not seen the god-king of the dead yet, and he is still curious.

—-

Zhenya is on the far side of the river, and his feet are in the water.

“I’ve told you a thousand times not to do that,” Sasha says, hopping off the ferry to tie it up. Zhenya just grins at him, and Sasha rolls his eyes.

“I can’t visit my aunt?” Zhenya asks.

“All you children of the sun are more trouble than you’re worth,” Sasha grouses, flopping down onto the bank beside Zhenya. Zhenya raises an eyebrow.

“Thinking of someone in particular?” he asks.

Sasha narrows his eyes. “Why?”

“Somebody saw something, maybe,” Zhenya says, looking out across the river thoughtfully.

Sasha doesn’t even know where to start with this. “Somebody?” he asks, sarcastic. “Why didn’t _somebody_ come tell me personally?”

“You’re too scary,” Zhenya says, and laughs at Sasha’s expression.

“There’s no reason to be scared of me,” Sasha grumbles, because there isn’t. Anyone down here is either already dead, or deathless. They have no reason to fear death.

“Well, I know that,” Zhenya says, smile tucked in the corner of his mouth. Zhenya, with gold in his blood and his father’s chariot afire under him, had laughed when he’d taken Sasha’s outstretched hand. And now he paddles in the river of eternity, and fractures Sasha’s peace, and Sasha would not give him up for anything. “But not everyone’s as smart as me.”

“No one’s as smart as you,” Sasha says, nudging his shoulder up against Zhenya just to see him laugh and flush.

“Anyway,” Zhenya says. “You were right, about the gold-haired one.”

Sasha sighs. He’s going to have to tell Alex about this, now, and he had hoped to avoid that. There has been nothing new here for a long, long time, and never anything that full of life. “What, exactly, did ‘somebody’ see?” he asks, so Zhenya tells him.

—-

Nicke tries to stay away, for a little while. He reads a great deal, and work is reasonably entertaining most days, but at the back of it all he’s so bored that he untangles the curse on the break room refrigerator and watches to see how long it takes anyone to notice. Almost a week, it turns out. 

So Nicke stays away, until the potential consequences of getting caught seem less dire than the bite of his unsatisfied curiosity. This is less time than it should be, perhaps, because it is autumn, and autumn always makes him a little less patient with this world and its limits. It makes him more mindful of what has gone from it, how much will never be harvested by the hands of his mother.

Nicke does not make it to the quay, this time. He’s accosted halfway down the passage, by Sasha.

“So, you return,” Sasha says. Nicke is prepared for anger, expects it even, but Sasha merely looks tired.

“You have no governance over me,” Nicke says stiffly, crossing his arms. “You cannot forbid me from going where I will.”

“Maybe not,” Sasha says, “but the one who rules this land can shut out anyone he pleases. Even little godlets who overestimate their own strength.” This last is said more with amusement than with anger, although the tiredness still lingers around Sasha’s eyes and mouth.

Nicke shakes back his hair, proudly. “If he is going to shut me out, he might at least grant me an audience.”

“So, that is your game?” Sasha says. Nicke purses his lips in irritation, but does not deny it. Sasha heaves a sigh and then shrugs. “Very well. Far be it from me to try and cross destiny.”

Nicke does not like this. “I’m simply curious,” he says sharply, “it’s not an omen.”

“Curiosity is always an omen, young one,” Sasha says, and he tweaks one of Nicke’s curls. Nicke jerks back out of reach and scowls. “Now, which will it be? Do you wish to see the king, or do you wish to depart and not return?”

“I wish to see the king,” Nicke snaps. Sasha makes him elaborate and deeply sarcastic bow.

“Then follow me,” he says.

Nicke let down his hair, before entering the tunnel, but he does it up in a quick braid before stepping onto the ferry boat. He does not pin it or cover it, he wants the light, but he also does not like the feeling of vulnerability having it entirely revealed gives him.

The passage across the river is slow, and Sasha does not speak to him. Nicke thinks he sees a shape moving in the shadow of the dark on the opposite bank, perhaps two shadows, but when they pull in and Sasha ties the boat, Nicke can see nothing but another pebbled shoreline.

There is light here, at least, torches mounted at intervals around a vast and seemingly endless wall. At the gate, massive and elaborate and firmly closed, is a colossal three-headed dog. Nicke does not precisely duck behind Sasha, but he does move a little so more of him is hidden by Sasha’s bulk. He is not overly fond of dogs.

“Don’t worry,” someone says. “He’s actually very friendly.” Nicke seriously doubts that, and not just because the man’s tone is slightly teasing. He gives the newcomer a skeptical look, and pretends he doesn’t see Sasha rolling his eyes in his peripheral vision.

“I’m Sergei,” the…guard? Nicke supposes, says. “This is Cerberus.”

The middle head of Cerberus looks Nicke over suspiciously, sniffing his chest and hair and then snorting and sneezing a little and backing away. The left head, which is slightly bigger and has floppy ears, is just staring at Nicke with it’s tongue hanging out. The right head seems utterly uninterested in him; it’s watching Sasha and blinking slowly.

“Hello,” Nicke tells the space between them middle and left heads hesitantly.

“You can pet them if you want,” Sergei says, scratching behind the ears of the head on the left. In the distance, Nicke hears a huge tail thumping against the ground. He thinks about politely denying this request, but Sasha is petting the right head now and the middle head is staring mournfully at Nicke. He gives it a tentative pat. “Come on Cerberus,” Sergei says, coaxing the dog, and it lumbers slowly out of the way, revealing an enormous elaborately carved gate. Nicke doesn’t see any kind of opening for a key, or even a crack along which the gate might open. When Sasha runs a palm down over the surface, though, a split appears down the middle and it slides open, slow but silent. In spite of the nearby torches, whatever is beyond the gate is completely and utterly invisible, an enormous yawning chasm.

“Come on,” Sasha says, and steps through. Nicke takes a deep breath and follows.

After a few unpleasant seconds of nothingness- no sound, no light, not even the feeling of air against his skin- Nicke emerges out into something strange, and wholly unexpected.

He had no ideas, really, about what the land of the dead might look like. Not here, and not back in the land he was born in. He had somewhat anticipated the river, and the gate, had carried an idea, however vague, of the sorts of boundaries one realm creates to shut out another. He had not known precisely the details: what the rough texture of the pebbles on the shore would be like, that the ferry boats would be white and long-necked as swans, that the gate would be covered in hundreds of thousands of letters, carved so closely and densely as to be unreadable, but he had known the hulking shapes of them in the darkness of his own imagination.

This, though, the land itself, is entirely new.

_It’s beautiful_, is Nicke’s first thought, full of surprise. It is, if a strange kind of beauty.

He and Sasha are on the top of a tall hill, with small foothills rolling down beneath them into a deep and sheltered valley. The hill is, not grassy, precisely. Nicke bends down to examine the ground. It’s covered in a kind of thick-growing liverwort that shivers and surges up toward Nicke’s hand.

“Watch your hair,” Sasha says irritably. Nicke glances over to where his braid has swung over his shoulder and down toward the ground. The liverwort has started to swarm up the end of it, tangling in the bottom three inches already.

Nicke tugs gently on his braid, fingers stroking over the plant and encouraging them to let go. They do, albeit with much more reluctance than Nicke has ever gotten from an above-ground plant. He straightens back up, meeting Sasha’s frown with a raised eyebrow.

“This isn’t your domain,” Sasha says. “Be careful with the plants.”

“I’m not going to do them any harm,” Nicke says hotly. Sasha rolls his eyes, and mutters something in a language Nicke doesn’t understand. Whatever it is doesn’t sound flattering.

“Come on,” Sasha says, jerking his chin toward a broad cobblestone path that leads down into the valley.

Nicke follows Sasha down, looking around him curiously. From up here, he can see much of this city of the dead. It’s huge and sprawling, and seems to be organized in a vast series of whorls and spirals, rows of buildings curling in on each other and then back out in elaborate patterns. It’s bright and colorful, flashes of red among gold and silver, with broad white roads and patches of dark greens and browns that Nicke suspects are gardens, of a sort. Above it all is set a huge dome, curving up and up in the distance. It’s too far overhead for Nicke to distinguish much of it, but it appears to be beaten gold and inset with constellations of gems, twinkling dimly in the light. There is no sun, obviously, and there appears to be no one source of light at all. Instead, the whole dome emits a kind of bright radiance, bathing the city below in a steady and even glow.

The road coming down through the hills is uneven, built from broad rough stone, but it smooths and flattens as they come down into the city itself. The buildings on the edge of the city are small and sort of cottage-like, and Nicke sees someone watching him from an open window in the second one. Whoever it is darts back behind the curtain when Nicke looks over.

The outskirts of the city are empty, but as they move farther along the broadest road, Sasha moving confidently toward the center of the valley and ignoring the side streets that spiral off, Nicke starts to see people. No one approaches them, and a fair amount of the people they pass either stop to stare or hurry off in the opposite direction. Nicke tilts his chin up, ignoring the stares, and concentrates on keeping up with Sasha.

They approach what Nicke can only describe as a palace, red-walled and domed with greens and blues and gold. It’s beautiful, and vaguely familiar, but still too distant to see particularly clearly. While the palace is still much lower than the surrounding hills, it’s elevated a little from the rest of the city.

Nicke has been hearing water for the past few hundred yards, and now he sees the source of it. There is a second river in the center of the city. It forms, not quite a moat, but a sort of circle spiraling around the palace and then down the hill. The sides are cut into wide terraces by the flow of the stream, but instead of gardens or crops, each section is paved in flat, colorful stone. As Nicke gets closer, following Sasha up the narrow stairs from terrace to terrace, he sees that the stone forms incredibly detailed mosaics. He wants to stop and look at them more closely, but Sasha is fast and Nicke isn’t entirely sure Sasha won’t abandon him if he’s too slow.

The top of the hill is broad and flat, a narrow strip of stone and earth creating a rim that’s just wide enough for someone to stand on comfortably. They’ve come around the hill somewhat as they climbed, and the river looks almost like an enclosed pool of water. Nicke can’t see a place where it spills over the rim and down the hill, or where the water comes from. He can only tell it’s a river because of how quickly it’s moving. It looks dangerous, and Nicke is glad he doesn’t have to boat across this one.

The bridge spanning the width of the river is so delicate Nicke is half-afraid it will crumble under his weight. Sasha _seems_ fairly solid, as do most of the people Nicke saw on the way up here, but none of them are exactly alive, and Nicke isn’t certain how much he can trust his senses here. Sasha, still, is striding on without looking back, though, so Nicke takes a deep breath and follows.

The bridge is a yellowed ivory color, less than two feet wide and with only one thin handrail on either side. It’s carved into some kind of floral motif, fine as lace, and Nicke can see the dark water below rushing across the open parts of the carving. It makes him dizzy, looking down, so he keeps his eyes on Sasha’s back. He doesn’t touch the handrails; they look like they would snap under the pressure of his hand.

Nicke breathes a quiet sigh of relief when they reach the far side of the river. To his surprise, the palace doors are open and unguarded. In fact, the foyer is entirely empty, and Nicke gets only the impression of cold floors and pillars in the distance before Sasha ushers him through a heavy door and into a kind of sitting room.

Nicke notes in passing the fat smooth columns of green stone, swirling with light and dark patches almost like oil on the surface of water, the huge crystal chandeliers overhead, three of them, diffusing a warm but not overwhelming light, the elaborately painted walls, the heavy red-and-gold furniture, but none of it catches his attention. His gaze is drawn, instead, to the figure sprawled on a chair in the middle of the room.

Neither the chair nor its occupant fit the room, exactly. The chair is hideous and squashy and looks bizarre dropped, as it is, into the center of the otherwise museum-like room. The man in the chair is dressed in some kind of denim wraparound garment with what Nicke is fairly sure is a rhinestone skull on the chest. He has a string instrument in his lap, but he sets it on the ground when he sees them come in and stands up. His face is friendly, but Nicke almost takes an involuntary step back, anyway.

This man is not like Sasha, or like Nicke. If you look at them sideways, and not very closely, you can mistake them for entirely human. This man, who is walking toward Nicke and smiling, is so clearly divine that it makes Nicke want to bend his head, a little, to genuflect. He sets his jaw and tilts his head back slightly. At his side, Sasha snorts, and then says something Nicke can’t understand.

“It’s okay,” the god of the dead says, looking over at Sasha. Nicke feels the absence of his gaze like a splash of water over his skin, ice-hot. “You can leave us.”

Sasha does not say anything. Nicke thinks he hears him leave the room, but he’s too absorbed in his study of the room’s occupant to bother looking. Nicke has never seen a god more powerful than his mother, than himself. Sasha is much, much older, and has more responsibility, but he is more like Nicke than he is like this stranger. Nicke and Sasha, for all their divinity, belong to humanity. Sasha is the place the human realm touches the one beyond, and Nicke is the place the sun rests upon the earth. This god, this king, is something entirely beyond humanity, and alien to it, and Nicke wants to soak him in like soil starved for rain.

“Hello.” And his eyes are back on Nicke, now, and it settles under Nicke’s skin like a sunburn. “Sasha said you wanted to see me.”

He is not what Nicke would call flaunting his divinity. For one thing, Nicke sincerely doubts this palace doesn’t have a throne room, of some kind, but this is certainly not it. For another, he’s dressed like a midwestern impression of an ancient Greek. Nicke had no idea what to expect, but it wasn’t this. The contrast, between the power Nicke can feel radiating from him and the ill-fitting trappings, between the wild unruliness of his bone structure and the kindness of his eyes, between the strange informality of this meeting and all Nicke has known of the nature of life and of death, it’s fascinating.

“Yes,” Nicke says finally. He clears his throat, tries to stop staring. “I wished to see the king.”

“That’s me,” the god says, bowing slightly and then spreading his hands and grinning. “You can just call me Alex, though.”

“Alex,” Nicke says skeptically. “That’s your name?”

“I have a lot of names,” Alex says, shrugging. “What did you want to see me for? Just curious?”

_Curiosity is always an omen_, Sasha says in Nicke’s head.

“I guess,” Nicke says. Nicke is not certain what he expected, but he finds he is a little disappointed by the lack of something to push back against. To fight, even. Disappointed, and something else he can’t quite put a finger on, a vague, unsettled feeling.

“Can I see the flower?” Alex asks, holding out a hand. Nicke hesitates, and Alex doesn’t push but he also doesn’t withdraw his hand.

Slowly, Nicke pulls the jonquil from his pocket, where it’s been since he picked it. When he opens his own hand to reveal the flower, it is not crushed, although he has been clutching it with more tightness than care. It remains fresh, still, although the ends of the leaves are beginning to wilt a little.

Alex does not take it from him, merely smooths the petals. Nicke feels the tingle of magic in his fingers, where they touch the flower, and he feels the way the nature of it changes. Before, it was a flower. Unusual, certainly, and magical, but of the earth, and of the sun. Nicke could probably not have kept it alive forever, out of the earth, but he could touch the life in it, stretch it out, tighten and smooth it. He feels the life leave it now, feels something else take its place.

It is not like the life leaving a body, or a plant. It is not a passing on, a journey out of sight. That is the start of it, but not the end. For the first time, Nicke feels the magic of death in what was once alive; what seemed to be merely an arc becomes a circle, clarified and revealed and set before his eyes for one shimmering instant.

When Alex takes his hand away, the flower has become a kind of bangle, petals an infinitely fine gold and the stem a solid curve of green. It falls from Nicke’s numb fingers, but Alex catches it before it hits the ground.

“Sorry,” Alex says. “I should have taken it to change it. I didn’t burn you, did I?”

“It takes more than that to burn me,” Nicke snaps, nettled. He’s not some weak and fading human, dazzled by a deity in a meadow. He has his own power, his own abilities.

“Of course,” Alex says, he holds out the bangle, smiling almost shyly. “This will allow you passage.” It’s generous of him, much more generous than Nicke deserves, which makes Nicke suspicious.

“And in return?” Nicke asks. Alex looks at him, thoughtfully. Nicke looks back. Alex does not say _I could forbid you entrance here,_ although he could. He does not say _were you mortal, I could claim your soul for what you have done,_ although he could. He does not even say, _you are here only upon my sufferance_, although Nicke is. That is what the flower is, a token of royal pardon.

“I ask nothing of you,” Alex says, finally. He holds out the bangle again. “I merely offer.”

Slowly, Nicke holds out his hand. He watches Alex fasten the bracelet, fitted perfectly to Nicke’s wrist and settling warm against his skin. It feels strange, not-alive and deathless, and the sense of it flutters in Nicke’s stomach, queasy but not entirely unpleasant.

“Thank you,” Nicke says. Alex looks up at him. His hand is still holding the bangle where it encircles Nicke’s wrist, and Nicke can feel the pressure of his hand although he is not holding particularly tightly. Alex smiles.

—-

Nicke thinks, later, that perhaps he could have stopped himself from returning, had that first meeting gone a little differently. Had Alex tried to give more of an impression of his own power, made Nicke feel his generosity more, perhaps Nicke would not have come back. Nicke does not like to feel he is accruing debt, in any circumstance. He does not like to feel small, or powerless.

As it is, he gets caught somewhere in the chase of light and shadow across Alex’s face, the press of his fingertips so close to Nicke’s pulse, and that foreign-familiar feeling proximity to Alex gives him. A feeling like weightlessness, suspension at the highest point, like that first moment of stepping from nothingness onto the top of the hill and seeing the whole of the city of the dead spread out at his feet.

As it is, Nicke cannot quite stop himself from returning to see it, the city and her king, again.

—-

The second time Nicke comes to the palace, Alex meets him in the same room and offers him a platter. It is flat and wide and golden, with crenellated sides, and laden with fruits and cheeses. Nicke looks down at the shine on the side of an apple, and back up at Alex. The platter must be heavy, but Alex does not seem to notice its weight. His eyes are on Nicke, and his arm is steady.

“No, thank you,” Nicke says.

He does not eat anything because he knows the rules. Alex offers but does not press, and Nicke does not find himself hungry.

Not until later.

—-

Nicke comes down the long dark tunnel out onto the pebbled beach, with the jonquil on his wrist and his braid over his shoulder to light the way. Sasha seemed to know Nicke was coming, last time and the time before, but this time Sasha is nowhere to be seen. There is a boat, though, empty and gliding right toward Nicke. It bumps up against the edge of the river, almost doglike in its eagerness. Nicke hesitates, and the boat thumps insistently against the side of the river again. Nicke climbs in, and the boat takes off for the other shore with a slow, measured steadiness.

It’s not until Nicke has climbed out of the boat and started toward the gate that he notices the shadow, not his own, falling before him and the footsteps, not his own, echoing behind him. He tangles his fingers in the end of his braid and turns, slowly.

The person following him does not try to hide, or run away, but he also does not speak. He looks Nicke over curiously, head tilting in an almost birdlike fashion.

“Can I help you?” Nicke asks stiffly.

The person laughs, a grating squawk of a noise that Nicke finds inexplicably endearing. “Think that’s my question,” he says. “The boat work okay?”

“I suppose,” Nicke says, fighting the urge to fiddle with the flower at his wrist. “How are they meant to work?”

“Well- I’m Evgeny, by the way. Zhenya if you like. They’re supposed to just work for Sasha, normally. He gets cranky, though, coming to get you all the time.”

“I’ve noticed,” Nicke mutters. Evgeny laughs again.

“Anyway, they work for you now, as long as you have that,” Evgeny nods at the bracelet.

“Right,” Nicke says slowly. “Are they your boats?” He can’t quite get a read on Evgeny. He’s certainly some kind of god, which Nicke would be able to tell even if it weren’t obvious from how he’s past the bounds of the gate. He doesn’t feel like a god of death, though, not even close.

Evgeny shrugs. “They’re their own boats, but I teach them tricks sometimes.”

Nicke doesn’t know how to respond to this. “Oh,” he says lamely.

“Come on,” Evgeny says, starting toward the gate. “I don’t want to slow you down. I just wanted to meet the one causing all the fuss.”

“I didn’t intent to cause any trouble,” Nicke says, sort of truthfully. It certainly isn’t his goal, but he’s also not unaware that he’s very much doing something he’s not supposed to, that goes against the nature of what he is and is meant to be.

“I like it,” Evgeny says blithely. “It gets boring down here. Anyway, if you get tired of Alex and Sasha come find me, I’ll show you around. I want to know what you think of my trees.”

“Your trees?”

“Yeah,” Evgeny shrugs. “Plants are weird here, you know. Most stuff won’t grow. Alex likes the flowers made from jewels, but they’re a little much for me. I make trees instead.”

They’re at the gate, now, and Cerberus is wriggling all over as all three heads attempt to solicit pets from Evgeny at once.

“Thanks for the help with the boats,” Nicke says, using the distraction to slip around the dog and through the gate.

He still gets a lot of stares, walking through the city, but no one other than Evgeny has dared to approach him yet. He’s relieved when he gets to the palace, striding quickly through the echoing emptiness of the foyer, but when he goes into the sitting room Alex isn’t there. Nicke fights down an irrational surge of annoyance.

He has no reason to be irritated, that Sasha didn’t come to meet him, that Alex isn’t where Nicke expected him to be. It makes him feel unimportant, though, and inconsequential, and Nicke does not like being made to feel that way.

_What am I_ doing _here_, Nicke thinks, looking at Alex’s chair. There’s a cushion on it, with that slumped half-stuffed look pillows get from being used for too long.

Nicke almost leaves, brought to uncomfortable self-consciousness by the lack of reception, but in the end the temptation to look around the palace unaccompanied is too great.

He goes back into the foyer, there is only one entrance to this room, and contemplates which direction to take. He starts for a door partly concealed by a hanging tapestry, but as he gets close to it Nicke thinks he can hear voices coming from the other side. Not ready to run into anyone yet, he decides to try the upstairs first.

At the top of the stairs is a small landing, and then an enormous open archway. The whole center of the second floor is one large room, dipping slightly toward the middle like a large shallow basin. Nicke steps through the arch, careful on the uneven floor. To his surprise, he sees that there is no ceiling to this room. He can see the domes of the surrounding towers along the edges of the opening, but most of the view is taken up by the golden sky. Nicke can’t be certain, but he thinks perhaps the sky is a little dimmer than the last time he was here, that the jeweled constellations are a little brighter. He wonders if there is a sort of night, here, or if it is only always day.

Nicke bumps up against something, nearly stumbling, and takes his eyes off the sky to adjust his balance. He’s reached the dais in the center of the room. Nicke looks up at the two thrones above him, intricate and black, and feels a shiver of unease run down his spine. There is something he doesn’t like about them, something he can’t quite pinpoint.

He watches where he’s going, this time, and leaves the throne room.

—-

“No, I’m not finished,” Sasha says, irritation starting to edge into actual anger. He is attempting to keep a leash on his temper, because he’s well aware that it’s not actually Alex he’s angry at, and Alex gets a pinched, unhappy look when Sasha snaps at him.

“You just keep saying the same thing,” Alex says, and Sasha feels his annoyance cinch a little tighter at how tired Alex sounds.

“Because you aren’t listening to me,” Sasha points out, sharp. “I don’t understand why you keep granting him passage. He’s crossing in and out of your realm as if it’s his place to do so, and you keep permitting it.” This is a lie. Sasha does understand, and that is what is making him angry, and afraid. It is an old story, and rarely a happy one, the fascination of life and death for each other. They are two kingdoms which do not overlap, which should not overlap, with Sasha in between them.

“He’s not doing any harm,” Alex says. “Why shouldn’t I allow it?”

Sasha sighs. Alex is not young, by human standards, but sometimes, still, he is young in Sasha’s eyes. Alex might be a god, but Sasha is a force of nature. He has seen generations of gods of death, here. Seen them come, and seen them pass on to wherever gods go when they fade away. He was here when this palace was built.

Sasha likes Alex, also, and wants him to be happy. He does not trust this outsider, with the sun in his hair and his careless hands. “He has no reason to stay,” Sasha says quietly. “You understand that, don’t you?” He knows, even as he says it, that the words are useless.

“Of course I understand that,” Alex says stiffly. He turns to go, and Sasha does not stop him.

Sasha leans against the parapet, propping his chin in his hands, and watches the bustle of the city below. He can hear Alex stomping down the spiral staircase behind him, loud in his irritation, and he can feel Nicke flitting about in the palace below. The presence of his aliveness is like a humming insect on the edge of Sasha’s perception: annoying, out of place, wrong.

Alex is being stupid about this, and the inevitability of it all does not make it rankle any the less. This is the problem, with kings of the dead. They stay shut up in their own realms, untested and vulnerable to the first flash of light they see, the first glimpse of life. Alex is the dead of winter, thick sturdy ice that will not crack underfoot. He is not treacherous, and that makes him vulnerable to treachery.

What Sasha meant when he said Nicke had no reason to stay, what Alex had not wanted to hear, is that Nicke has no reason to remain here, save power. This is another native weakness of kings; they love jewels. The prettiest jewels are the most powerful, and the strongest, and the ones which require much worship. And Sasha could tell, from the single lock of Nicke’s hair that fell out of his beanie one day at the library, curling around his ear, that Nicke is a powerful jewel indeed.

—-

Nicke is back in the sitting room, when Alex finds him. Nicke is examining one of the malachite pillars; he finds the smooth coolness of the green soothing. He doesn’t turn immediately when he hears Alex come in, and after a few seconds of silence Alex clears his throat politely. Nicke lets his hand drop, turning.

“Have you been here long?” Alex asks.

“No,” Nicke says, and then wishes he’d been a little more equivocal. He isn’t sure if Alex can tell, when he comes into the land of the dead. Perhaps not, but Nicke doesn’t want to seem dishonest.

Alex seems to accept Nicke’s statement though, asking him what he wants to see. _He knows you were wandering around the palace, uninvited and unsupervised_, a voice in the back of Nicke’s head says. It’s most likely nonsense, and Nicke reading far too much into this simple interaction, but still. He wants to get out of the palace, suddenly, away from the dark thrones and the empty rooms.

“I ran into someone on the way here,” Nicke says. “Evgeny. He mentioned some trees?”

“Oh,” Alex seems slightly taken aback.

“Or, I don’t have to-” Nicke says hastily.

“I can-” Alex starts, at the same time. They both lapse into silence, staring at each other. Nicke isn’t sure why he’s so stupidly nervous, far more so than even the first time he crept through the gateway in the cemetery. He’s not afraid Alex will harm him. Really, the worst he can do is stop allowing Nicke to enter his kingdom. And yet, inexplicably, being around Alex is undeniably making Nicke nervous.

He tells himself firmly that he’s being ridiculous. “Will you show me the trees?” he asks again.

“Of course,” Alex says, smiling, and he gestures for Nicke to follow him. “I’m afraid the gardens will be a disappointment to you,” Alex continues, as they wend their way through the rooms of the palace and out a small and unassuming side door. “Not much can grow here.”

“I know,” Nicke says, skimming light fingers over the hedge of rose bushes that borders the path to the garden. They are made entirely of gold of varying hues, blooms, thorns and all.

He sees what Evgeny means, when they get to the small grove of poplar trees. Much of the garden is taken up with gaudy crystalline flowers or elaborately sculpted fountains. The only actual growing thing is a massive pomegranate tree, which Nicke carefully does not look at.

The poplars give Nicke a strange mingled feeling of relief and sadness. Unlike the flowers, they look almost real, tall and slender with delicate amber leaves clinging to the almost impossibly thin silver branches. They are beautiful, and clearly created with skill.

Alex is right, though. Nicke is disappointed. He misses the wild riotousness of the earth, the way it feels when it is soaked with rain and baked dry by sun, full of life. Somehow, the closer the plants come to imitating life, the more they make Nicke crave the real thing. He puts a palm on the tight rough-smooth bark of the poplar, presses a thumb just underneath a swelling bud of amber. It is cool, and holds no life, and Nicke lets his hand drop back to his side.

He looks up the towering height of the tree, thinks about how it will never continue to grow. And then, as usually happens when he leaves his mind untended when a little sad, he thinks about his mother, and the poppies that grew on her grave.

“Let’s go back inside,” Nicke says quietly, and they do.

The golden platter is there, set with a tea service and laden with cakes, when they get back to the sitting room, but Alex does not offer it.

—-

Nicke almost does not come back, after that time. But then, a few days later, he is sitting having his lunch, and looking out the window, and he sees Alex’s face in his memory.

He wonders what it was that made Alex look so solemn as they left the poplar grove. He wonders if the god of death understands mourning by instinct, and by birthright, or if Alex, too, has lost someone he cannot regain.

—-

The fourth time Nicke visits the underworld, Alex takes him out into the city, and shows him the bright jewel-like cottages and the wide and winding road and the intricate street lamps that light up when the golden dome overhead dims.

Nicke sees, in the distance, the gardens where food is grown, and he crosses over a small bare dead patch of earth where no cobblestone has been laid, but he keeps his attention on Alex, and does not think about the coldness of the earth. It is not so difficult. Other than that little bit of earth, tucked between a squat red brick library and a bend in the road, Nicke’s feet touch only stone.

They return to the palace, and Alex offers him a plain but delicious-smelling mushroom stew in a dish on the golden platter. Nicke declines, but he feels something settle happily under his breastbone at the gesture.

—-

There is a throne at his right that has been empty, maybe, for a long time. Alex is not certain of the order or length of human history, or its eras, but the throne, certainly, is older than him and had been empty for as long as he has been here.

He knows, sort of, why Sasha is worried, and what he is worried about. _But,_ Alex thinks, _what is the use of an empty throne?_ Still, when he finds Nicke in the throne room one day, he feels a cold slice of not-quite fear go through him. He willfully pushes past it.

Alex knows Nicke has no reason to stay, and he knows that Nicke’s reasons for returning might have much more to do with the kingdom than they do with Alex. Still, he can’t quite stop himself from laying the entirety of what he has to offer at Nicke’s feet, in the hope of seeing him one more time. Nicke is so bright, and so warm, and he looks a little like Alex has always pictured the sun.

Alex takes him to the hall of artisans. It is mostly empty, at this time of day, and the few remaining guests cast uncertain looks at Nicke and scurry out the door at the far end of the hall.

“Something I said?” Nicke asks, looking after them.

“No,” Alex smiles, a half-conscious response to the dry humor in Nicke’s tone. “People who are still alive are strange and a little scary, here. You remind them of family they left behind, you know?” Nicke gives Alex a look he can’t quite interpret, and then turns to examine the pedestal in front of them.

Nicke inspects the music box, and then the chess set to the right of it, and he continues down the row of objects like that. Alex stays where he is, and watches Nicke, curious as to what will catch his interest.

The bulk of the palace is not technically off limits, but people generally only come through it on scheduled tours, or for appointments. The sitting room is for Alex's private use, and his room up on the top floor is always locked. The artisan hall, though, is always open to the public. It's a fairly popular and well attended attraction, partly because what's in it rotates. It holds the best and most beautiful treasures the kingdom has to offer, and it is a high honor indeed to have your work chosen to be displayed there. Technically, Alex supposes, it all belongs to him. He’s not certain, for he has never tested that precept. Alex has always tried his best to maintain equality, a just distribution of what the kingdom has to offer, as much as he can.

Nicke goes through the room with a slow methodical thoroughness, until he makes a full circuit and ends up back where he started, next to Alex. In that moment, the space between Nicke turning from the final pedestal and Nicke arriving at Alex’s right, Alex is grateful for the evenness of Nicke’s attention. He’s glad he didn’t have to face the temptation of Nicke coveting one of these treasures, that sort of but not simply belong to Alex. Alex very much suspects he would have offered any of them to Nicke at the slightest hint of interest. He would have stolen from his own people, expecting no more in return than half a smile.

Alex is still half a step back, catching up with himself, when Nicke frowns and looks over at the door of the room. Alex turns, and just stops himself from groaning aloud.

—-

One of the three is not where he belongs, is the first thing Nicke notices. Nicke is not exactly an expert on the people of this kingdom. Most of his time here has been spent with Alex, and everyone else—save Evgeny and Sasha—practically runs away when they see Nicke coming. Still, he’s seen a fair few of them, and part of being divine is knowing where people belong and where they do not. This kingdom might not be his domain, but the one in the middle is, in a way, and that makes him stick out all the more.

The two on the edges look a little uncertain of their own boldness, glancing with nervous deference at Alex, but the one in the middle strides right up to Nicke.

“Are you enjoying the hall of artisans?” he says.

“It’s all right,” Nicke says raising his eyebrows. It’s strange, hearing his native language this far away from home and on the other side of death.

“The palace is closed right now, Andre,” Alex says, and that, hearing _Alex_ speak his native language, is stranger than all of Nicke’s experiences in the land of the dead, combined. He isn’t entirely sure how he feels about it.

“That wasn’t announced,” Andre says, a little sulky. Nicke is amused, in spite of himself. Alex sighs.

“Perhaps we could walk in the gardens?” Nicke proposes, partly to see how Alex will react. Nicke is curious, why this person who doesn’t belong to this land is here. He is curious for a lot of reasons, but one of them, certainly, is what this strange inclusion says about Alex’s rulership of this land.

“Perfect,” Andre says sunnily. He takes Nicke’s arm, practically marching him toward the doors of the hall and leaving his friends and Alex to sort each other out.

“You aren’t very deferent to your king,” Nicke says. He doesn’t bother making his tone scolding. It isn’t really his concern, how Alex’s subjects choose to treat his leadership.

“Well, he’s not really _my_ king,” Andre replies, tone sly. He slants a look at Nicke, who pretends he doesn’t catch the implication.

“Because your death doesn’t belong here?” Nicke asks. Andre shrugs.

“It isn’t so unusual, is it, going to the underworld where your husbands are?”

“I suppose not,” Nicke says slowly. “You treat such kindness very lightly, in any case.” It is not an easy thing to go from one land of the dead to another. Not even for a god.

Andre rolls his eyes. “If you’re going to be dull, I will happily surrender you back to _my_ king.”

Nicke laughs. “Peace, then. You’ve taken great means to speak with me. What did you want to say?”

“Well,” Andre loosens his hold a little, slowing their pace to more of a stroll. Nicke hasn’t looked back to see if the others are following, but Andre glances behind them and seems satisfied with whatever he sees. “I’m just curious, I suppose. How did you end up here?”

“It isn’t so unusual, traveling from the place one was born,” Nicke says, a touch sarcastically. Andre pinches his arm. It feels strange. His fingers are cool, the skin over them no longer yielding with life.

“You’re being dull again,” Andre says. Nicke bites back a smile. He finds himself being strangely candid. It’s not that his birth or his life are a mystery, particularly. Alex and Sasha can see the lines of his parentage at a glance. It is different to know something and to speak of it, though, and Nicke has not wanted to look to closely at his own fascination with death. He does not want to examine, particularly, why he keeps coming back here.

There is something about Andre’s lightness, for all he is not alive, that makes the weight of Nicke’s history fade a little. It is almost easy, in these strange gardens lit by crystal lamps, to say in the familiar language of home, “I’m not particularly good at staying in a place I was left behind.”

Andre’s eyes dart over his face, curious. “You are some sort of god, right? You must be, with that hair.” He reaches out to touch it, and Nicke catches his wrist.

“Don’t,” he says firmly. Andre pouts. “My mother was a goddess,” he acknowledges.

“What can you do?”

“Not much, here,” Nicke says, although this isn’t precisely true. He hasn’t tried to do much here. He’s already where he doesn’t quite belong, and he has no desire to exhaust Alex’s patience with his coming and going. He left home because it didn’t feel like home anymore, and followed Sasha to the cemetery because this new place doesn’t feel like home either. He can’t follow his mother, not until he finds his own death, and he can’t stop living until then. This, his queer flirtation with this foreign kingdom of the dead, is the first thing that has felt right in a long time.

“You must be able to do _something_,” Andre says. “Even Kuzy can do some stuff here, and his domain is the sun.”

“My domain is also the sun,” Nicke points out. This is more or less true. Andre’s hand drifts toward his hair again. “And that will burn you if you touch it,” Nicke says.

“Really?” Andre says, sounding more intrigued by the prospect than frightened.

“If I wish it to,” Nicke says. “I don’t like when people touch it without permission,” he adds pointedly.

“Fine,” Andre sighs. He pauses, thoughtful. “Can you grow things? Here I mean.”

“Perhaps,” Nicke says noncommittally, and steers them back inside.

—-

There are many pretty things in this kingdom. They do not tempt Nicke, much. He is not easily seduced by jewels or gold, although he does sometimes let his eyes linger on the filigreed little combs, delicate and strong and crowned in topaz. They would look well in his hair. He does not covet them, though, nor the crystal flowers, nor any of the delicacies Alex offers him on the golden platter with the crenelated sides.

What catches his eye, what nearly snares him, in the end, is something entirely unexpected. He is on his way to the palace, hurrying down an empty street, when he sees it. A patch of earth, bare of the usual cobblestones or marble. Bare entirely, and barren, save for a tiny little seedling nearly invisible in the gloom, away from the bright street lanterns.

Nicke kneels, and hesitates. He has seen what passes for gardens here, full of things that can grow without sun, pale and colorless save for the occasional burst of red. The flowers here cannot die, and do not need soil, and the earth is always cold when he touches it. This seedling is new, he is certain, because he takes this path to the palace often and he has not seen it before. He steps around this bit of land, generally.

_Careless of you,_ Nicke thinks, whether of himself or of the plant he isn’t sure, and brushes a fingertip over the leaf.

Starting it wasn’t intentional, but later, much later, he cannot claim he didn’t know where the path might lead, when the plant flushed bright green at the touch of his hand.

—-

Alex gives him a tour of the palace library. Nicke is not sure which visit it is; he has let himself lose count.

The library is not over-large. There are several in town that are bigger, and more elaborate. It is beautiful though, all warm, dark woods and elegant inbuilt bookcases and a massive hulking white fireplace with black sheep flocking in bas-relief across the top.

Nicke lets Alex lead him up the staircase, a careful few inches between them. Alex has not touched him since that first time, the press of their hands across the jonquil, brief and utterly overwhelming. Nicke has noted this more and more, since his encounter with Andre. The people of this kingdom have started to become less hesitant around Nicke, although still only Andre and Evgeny will actually approach him. Alex remains, for the most part, the same. He treats Nicke much like he treats the flowers in his garden: as something beautiful, and remote, and untouchable by death. Nicke does not close the distance between them, but he does wonder what Alex would feel like. If his skin would be yielding, as if life flowed under it. If it would spark warmth in Nicke’s fingertips.

“How are the books chosen for this room?” Nicke asks, running his hand down the spines. Some of the books look expensive and old, but many are simply ordinary. They are in no order Nicke can discern, a span of language and genre baffling in its breadth.

“Oh,” Alex laughs, a little self-consciously, and Nicke glances up at him. “They’re just the ones I particularly like. The important books, history and law and such, those are at the civic library.”

Nicke does not reply immediately. He likes throwing people a little off balance, undermining their expectations of him, proving them wrong. This isn’t exactly that. It’s more like, Alex’s expression, the way he is looking to Nicke for a reaction, is like ripples. Proving that Nicke is making an impact on him, a rock thrown into water. Nicke likes that, so he lets the silence hang for a moment, before he answers.

“You speak all these languages?” Nicke asks.

“I speak every language,” Alex says, “by birthright, although really understanding them completely takes a bit of time. And it’s different, of course, the ones I speak with people who live here, and the ones I’ve only read.”

He does not say this as if he wishes to impress, and Nicke is a little grateful that Alex’s attention is skimming down the row of books and not on Nicke’s reaction. Nicke is impressed, and lit up and greedy with the glut of knowledge this gives him, by proxy.

Nicke plucks one of the books, at random. “Read to me?” he asks.

—-

Nicke doesn't take the flower bangle off anymore. He’s starting to lose his sense of time, a little, when he’s aboveground. Life feels strange, remote, and the deepening of autumn does not help the sensation of foreignness.

The next warm day, Nicke calls in to work and drives an hour outside of town. He leaves his car on a deserted road somewhere, wanders out into the grass and weeds of an unclaimed field. It grows under his bare feet, lush and surging, and Nicke walks and walks like he’s wading into water. It is so easy, here, even on the edge of winter, to pull life out of the earth. Nicke lets it reach his ankles, thighs, waist, plants struggling toward his skin and hair, desperate to brush against the warmth of him.

Nicke presses the grass down into a soft bed, and lies upon the earth, letting his hair spread out beneath him. The sky is endlessly blue above him, mobile and adrift with clouds. Even the sun moves, slow and heavy like an unmanned boat, and Nicke thinks of the motionless gold of the sky below.

Life is all around and under him, a ceaseless throb of growing things. The grass is soft and insistent on his arms and legs, twisting gently to brush against his fingers and the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet. His hair glows and softens in the sun, melting like butter, the easy slow warmth of it tingling in his scalp.

It's nice—the sun, the earth, the rhythm of growing things—but all he can think about is what is beneath him. Deep in the soil, the start of life, and under that.

What keeps drawing him into the under, the dark, away from what should be his domain, is not something Nicke is quite ready to look at directly. Partly, he does not feel his own power so strongly here, where there is nothing to oppose it, to slow it, to press against it. There is nothing to make Nicke stand out. In the underworld, he is brighter for the darkness. He is something foreign, alien. Partly, Nicke stopped being able to find home a long time ago, and the feel of a permanent and visible not-belonging is the closest approximation he’s managed of going back. If he cannot feel truly settled, let him at least have his un-settledness be evident. Partly, tangled up with all of these reasons like tree roots, there is something deep in the earth. Some feeling, of delving into the deepest and most barren of places.

There is a place in the underworld, a small dead patch of earth where no cobblestone has been laid. When Nicke first crossed it, it was cold, and entirely empty of life. And then, from nothing but the repeated passages of Nicke’s feet, a tiny little seedling took root and began to grow.

Nicke likes being that quickening, the spark that splits barren seed and lets the life of it spill out like blood. The laying hands upon the root, deep in the womb of the earth. He has been the sun and the rising, and now he wants to be that.

He wants to be what comes before.

—-

Evgeny is waiting for Nicke on the shore again, this time right by the dock with his feet in the water.

“Is that safe?” Nicke says, eyeing the river skeptically as he steps carefully out of his boat.

Evgeny laughs, shrugs, and doesn’t answer the question. “I thought you might be coming today,” he says. “Sasha always gets his Nicke look when you are.” Nicke is entirely unsure how to respond to that. How does Sasha know he’s coming? The prospect is somehow disturbing, even though it makes sense. Sasha, more than anything else, is the god of crossings between this world and the last.

“I shudder to think,” Nicke says finally, “what that look is.” Evgeny laughs again, and slips one of his bony arms around Nicke’s elbow. Unlike Andre, he has enough sense not to touch Nicke’s hair, which is still pinned up in its coronet from work, although Nicke took his beanie off when he entered the passage. Evgeny’s skin is a little unpleasantly cool in the cave-like atmosphere of the far shoreline, but Nicke doesn’t pull away.

“Anyway, Andre wanted me to come get you. He can’t go past the gate.”

Nicke sighs. “What does he want now?” he grumbles, to disguise that this pleases him.

“I think he wants to show you around,” Evgeny says. Nicke hums noncommittally. He’s been around the city, but mostly just briskly along the route to the palace since that time with Alex. It might be interesting, to look around with someone else. Nicke doubts Andre excites the same natural deference from the people of this land that Alex does.

Nicke sort of wants to ask if Alex knows he’s here, like Sasha does. If Alex will be waiting for him. He can’t think of a way to phrase it that doesn’t reveal exactly what he means by the question, though, so he doesn’t ask.

“I suppose that’s acceptable,” he says instead, with false haughtiness, and is rewarded by another of Evgeny’s screechy laughs.

—-

“Oh, you’re here!” Andre says delightedly, coming out from behind the counter of what looks like a sort of dress shop. It’s mostly bolts of fabric in the broad, well-lit main room, although a series of mannequins in formalwear from various periods and styles are scattered about.

“Yes,” Nicke says, stopping to look at one of the dresses. It’s a black mermaid-style with a boat neck and a slit up the side. He brushes the back of his hand over the soft black velvet fabric.

“This is my husband’s shop,” Andre says, gesturing to the other man still standing by the counter, who looks sort of frozen and terrified like Nicke is a wild animal who has wandered in from the forest. “He can make you something, if you want,” Andre says, seeming entirely careless about volunteering someone else’s services.

“Andre!” the man hisses, and then turns his wide-eyed look on Nicke. “I mean, I can if you want?” he adds, with extreme hesitance.

“That’s alright,” Nicke says, lightly amused.

“Not in a like, trying to trap you here way,” Andre says with exasperation. “Obviously I just meant as a gift, Jakub. He knows that.” Nicke sort of wants to make a joke about this, but Jakub looks like he’s about to crawl under the counter and die (well, if he weren’t dead already), so Nicke refrains.

“What do you even do here?” Nicke says instead, to Andre. “Just offer gifts on your husband’s behalf?”

“I help,” Andre says, with a sniff. “But I do nails mostly. Manicures and stuff. My salon is next store, and then our other husband Dmitrij runs the tavern down the road in the evenings. Here,” he gestures for Nicke’s hands, “let me see.” Nicke rolls his eyes, but he lets Andre take his hands to examine them. “Your cuticles are terrifying,” he comments, “and don’t even get me started on the callouses. Do you moisturize these at all?”

“My cuticles are fine,” Nicke grumbles. His hands are hands that work with the earth, and the serve him well, but Andre is right in that they are not overly beautiful. “I have to do things other than hang around my husband’s shop with them.”

“For now, anyway,” Andre says blithely. Jakub groans and drops his face onto the counter. “Let me give you a manicure, come on. It’s going to give me nightmares if I don’t at least even them out and clean them up a little.”

Nicke lets Andre wheedle him into the salon next door eventually, partly because poor Jakub looks so abjectly miserable at Andre’s comprehensive irreverence. “Don’t touch the callouses,” Nicke warns, as Andre sets up his station, “I need those.”

“Fine,” Andre says, eyeing Nicke’s palms and giving a little huff of annoyed disappointment.

There was a short lull of quiet, when they came in, but Andre chatters happily into the silence and conversation picks back up after a few minutes. Nicke begrudgingly has to admit that Andre is good at this, both the nails and the putting people at ease. A few people actually come over to them, making polite small talk with Andre and Nicke. It’s nice, feeling like just another normal person here, even if just for a few minutes. Nicke is tired of being an outsider everywhere he goes. Alex doesn’t treat him that way, not quite, but people here, much like people in the city above, seem to always see Nicke as what he is, first and primarily. A god, from somewhere else, isolated from his family, and still alive. A guest of the king.

Nicke isn’t entirely sure how Alex sees him. He isn’t certain he wants to know.

“Do you want any color?” Andre asks, shaking a bottle of pale pink polish.

“I’ll just chip it,” Nicke says.

Andre shrugs. “You won’t be my only client who needs touch-ups all the time. I’ll just fix it next time you’re here.” It’s the casual assumption, the way it settles sort of warm behind Nicke’s breastbone, that makes him say yes.

“The tavern’s going to open soon, if you want to come by,” Andre offers, while Nicke’s nails are drying.

“I should probably get to the palace,” Nicke says, “but another time.”

—-

Nicke should have thought a little more, perhaps, about the precedent he was setting. The rules that govern gods of life in the domains of the dead are not ambiguous, really, but they are powerful. Power can create its own kind of ambiguity, blur its own margins. The only thing that will tie Nicke to this world permanently, while he still lives, is taking and eating food grown in the underworld from Alex himself. Gifts, even from Alex, do not necessarily oblige Nicke to do anything in particular. Gifts from Alex’s people are yet another step removed.

Still, it did not surprise Nicke, that Jakub was shocked by Andre’s boldness in so transparently offering to Nicke the material goods of this realm. It does not create an obligation, but it transmits an intention nonetheless. So, perhaps Nicke should have considered his own actions more carefully, in retrospect. At the time, though, it just seemed like another step down a path, not a beginning of a new journey. And anyway, he is so tired of holding himself apart all the time. What is the use of caution, to the lonely?

It starts with things just for when Nicke is there, in the underworld. Not food, no one is bold enough for that, but clothing, jewelry, little trinkets. Combs and nets for his hair are particularly popular. Everyone seems to want to give Nicke things, once that first barrier is breached, as an excuse to speak to him, to get to know him. There is much time, in the land of the dead, and little need for labor one finds unpleasant. The creation of artisan goods, particularly ones made from various metals, is by far the most popular occupation. They are all beautiful, or striking in their own way, and their creation is a labor of love and artistry on the part of their makers.

Nicke does not take things with him, back above ground. He does not even bring things into the palace, save for a set of combs from Evgeny. They are fashioned so a minute butterfly appears to flit from place to place in Nicke’s hair, and so delicate Nicke is afraid he’ll break them if he takes them out. Mostly, he leaves things in the care of Andre, if they are pretty, and Evgeny, if they are breakable.

Alex continues to offer only the golden platter.

—-

One evening, later and closer to full night than Nicke usually stays, Evgeny waylays him in the poplar grove. Nicke has left the palace, but he sometimes stops in the gardens on the way home.

“Someone wants to meet you,” Evgeny says, and Nicke jumps and spins around.

“Why are you sneaking up on me,” Nicke says, smacking his arm. “Walk louder.” Evgeny just laughs at him, and starts towing him down one of the paths. Nicke considers protesting, but all he has waiting for him at home tonight is leftovers, so he lets Evgeny steer them through town.

Although Nicke has met a fair amount of people, at this point, he hasn’t explored that many buildings, especially not closely. The city is huge, and the roads twisty and confusing, so Nicke mostly sticks to the path to the palace, the little row of shops Andre works in, and the tavern. Evgeny takes him to a boxy columned building, painted a sunny yellow. The base is square, but it has a circular, windowed floor set atop the first level, and a white sectioned dome on the top. It rather gives the impression of a simply decorated cupcake. The most striking aspect of the building, however, is the side. The front, with the columns and the broad entry doors, faces the street, the right side is only a few feet from another short boxy structure, but the left of the building opens onto a neatly paved square. Perched on the side of the building, particularly striking because of the spareness of the square, is an enormous clock.

It’s too complex for Nicke to get much of an idea of how it works. Evgeny almost immediately takes them through a small side door and into the building. Nicke catches a glimpse of gold and green and blue, a profusion of constellations, and hands that look like the sun and moon.

“What is this place?” Nicke asks curiously.

“It’s the caretaker’s cottage, kind of,” Evgeny says. A sturdy staircase circles the walls of the building, rising quickly out of view, and Nicke and Evgeny start climbing.

“Caretaker of what?”

“The sky,” Evgeny says.

“I see.” Nicke looks up, trying to see where they’re going, but they’re approaching a door set halfway between vertical and horizontal and he can’t see anything beyond it.

They come out into what Nicke assumes is the white dome. It’s fitted with an enormous telescope, so large that it has its own tiny set of stairs. The caretaker is coming down from this to greet them, smiling widely.

“Hello! You finally come!”

“I told you we’d be late,” Evgeny says, tone complaining. “Nicke always stays late at the palace.”

“I do not,” Nicke says defensively. He ignores the look Evgeny gives him in response. “This is a very nice telescope.” Nicke does not, in fact, know anything about telescopes or have any idea if this is a nice one, but it seems the polite thing to say.

“Thank you,” the caretaker says, beaming.

“Well apparently you two get on just fine without me,” Evgeny says. “You don’t even let me do introductions and you start on small talk.” The caretaker, whoever he is, seems well used to Evgeny. He just continues smiling placidly. “This is Nicke,” Evgeny says, gesturing at Nicke. “Nicke, Snarls.”

“Dima,” the caretaker corrects. “Only he calls me that.”

“It’s because he’s so grumpy,” Evgeny says sunnily, slinging an arm around Dima.

“Anyway,” Dima says, “you can look through the telescope if you want. Then I can take you up to see the sky closer.”

“Really? How?” Nicke asks, intrigued.

Dima opens his mouth to answer but Evgeny interrupts him. “Surprise,” he says. Nicke eyes him suspiciously, but lets Dima lead him over to the telescope.

He hasn’t had time to examine the sky in detail, to get more than a vague impression of it getting brighter and dimmer and note the jeweled stars set into it. Seeing it up close, even through the telescope, is astonishing. The constellations reflect, not quite the sky above, Dima explains. They’re modeled on the sky of the city in the center of the kingdom above, the one this underworld is tied to.

“This city is under a lot of places,” Dima says, “but that one is as good a sky as any of them.” The sky also moves, very slowly, and through the telescope Nicke can see that the ‘stars’ brighten as the gold dome dims.

“Did you do all of this?” Nicke asks. It must have been an astonishing amount of work.

“Oh no, no,” Dima says. “It’s very old. At least as old as when the cattle-herder ruled here, and that was a long time ago. The stars are supposed to be scales from his dragon.”

“They just look like gemstones from here,” Nicke says.

“Who can say, what dragons look like?” Dima points out, and Nicke can hardly argue with that.

“We go look closer,” Evgeny says, with a relish that promises the way up is an unpleasant surprise, rather than a welcome one. Nicke is curious, though, and he does want to see the sky more clearly, so he follows Dima down the stairs and out of the observatory.

There are large wheels around the base of the building, set all the way around save for a gap two wheels wide where the bottom face of the clock rests. Nicke took them for entirely decorative, on their approach. They look to be a solid and almost impossibly heavy gold, embossed with six-petaled roses, and are massive. They stand as high as Nicke’s chest, nearly to his shoulder with the added few inches they’re mounted above the ground. They are all fitting, gold like the building and beautiful and intricate like the clock, save for one. From a few yards away, Nicke thinks one of the wheels has simply fallen. It’s tucked right at the curve of the wall, where it forms a narrow alleyway with the building next door, and is the same size and shape as the other wheels. When they get closer, Nicke sees that this one is not gold but wood, and is undecorated. It, unlike the wheels on the wall, could perhaps have been used, a very long time ago. It looks so old it has transcended rot into a permanent solidness, and is rather splintery besides.

Dima, seemingly unbothered by splinters, runs a hand tenderly over the top of the wheel as if he is caressing an animal.

“Time to wake up, Mesyats,” he says. “Our hand is already rising on the clock.” The wheel shivers slightly, and Nicke takes a judicious step back. It shivers again, and then unloops suddenly into an ephemeral white horse. Mesyats whinnies, shaking his mane out, and then prances slightly in place.

As far as things go, a horse is a less terrifying means of transport than Nicke was envisioning, although he’d be more comfortable if Mesyats was slightly more solid.

“Are we all going to fit?” Nicke asks skeptically.

“You can go in the middle,” Evgeny says, “so you don’t fall off.”

“He won’t let you fall off, don’t worry,” Dima says reassuringly. Mesyats gives Nicke a measured, slightly disdainful look.

“You look like Sasha,” Nicke tells the horse, and Evgeny laughs.

In spite of Dima’s reassurances, Nicke holds rather tightly around Dima’s stomach on the way up. It’s really quite high, and the horse is fast, and Nicke is not entirely certain he made the right choice in allowing himself to be swept away on this tour of the sky.

It is beautiful up close, though, even more so than from far away. The stars appear to be large flashing opals and a scattering of tiny diamonds, all set into the smooth beaten gold of the sky itself. Dima points out the lines of tiny golden scales, smaller than Nicke’s pinky nail, that link up the opals of each constellation. They skim by Gemini, Lynx, stop briefly at Ursa Minor so Nicke can see Polaris. It’s all so carefully built, and so elaborate, that Nicke can’t imagine how long it took.

“This must be an awful lot of work to maintain,” Nicke muses, looking over at Virgo where it’s perched just on the horizon.

“Yes,” Dima says happily.

That night, when Nicke lays down to sleep, he can still see the bright gems of the stars flashing before his eyes.

—-

There is a hall, in the far northwest corner of the top floor of the palace, covered in mosaic. It is mostly notable because it is otherwise empty. There is no furniture, and the walls from floor to ceiling are entirely composed of colored tile.

“Here again?” Alex asks. Nicke turns to look at him. He is never unaware, exactly, of how large Alex is, how solid, but it strikes him anew just now. Alex, body holding the slight, quiet door to this hall open.

Hall is perhaps a generous term for what it is, a cramped and bent elbow of a space, for all its height, sandwiched between two unremarkable doors that nearly disappear under the onslaught of color. Nicke looks to Alex’s left, at the sun striking across the water in vibrant red, the neatness of the line smeared by the big jagged edges of the tiles. So much red, and so many, the rich tumbling blend of it reducing the dark water to insignificance.

Alex lets the door swing closed behind him, shutting them into the hall together, and comes to look beside Nicke.

A coronation scene is spread over most of the space between the sun and the opposite door, clipped strangely as if it were constructed somewhere bigger and then forced to fit here, edges smoothed off. The queen, with a crown of blue and one enormous yellow gem set into the mosaic itself, dominates the foreground of the scene. The black throne is behind her, eclipsed but not hidden by her regalia.

Nicke was not certain, at first, that it was the same throne. He did not look closely, at either the throne or this hall, when he happened upon them. He is certain, now, that they are the same, although he is not certain what impulse keeps bringing him back to examine both the image and the actuality.

The queen holds a scepter set with another large gem, this one blue, and her hair appears to be covered in some kind of jeweled net.

Alex shifts next to him, a careful six inches away even in the confined space, and Nicke looks at him. “The sun is in her hair and the tips of her fingers,” Alex says, quietly. He is still looking at the queen. Alex brushes a careful hand over the jewel in the scepter, and then in the one in the crown. “She is crowned in the sun and sky.”

“And what of him?” Nicke asks, nodding to the king in the background of the scene. His crown is almost difficult to see, merely a strand of sliver and a small line of gemstones across his brow.

“The stars,” Alex says, of the crown, “and the moon,” of the king’s scepter, tucked in the shadow that falls from the queen’s cloak.

The other side of the hall, to their backs, is less cohesive, more of a whirl of images than any one scene. Angled in the corner, a folded moon rising over an empty field. A feast, a table spilling over with fruits and meats and goblets of gold foil, interrupted by a narrow cobbled road running right through the middle of the image of the table. A pair of rabbits tucked along the bottom edge of the wall, hidden if the far door is open. A ram’s horn, curling around a red pomegranate. Nicke can never decide if they are both a part of the feast image, or separate from it, and each other.

Alex’s hand is still on the queen’s crown, but he is looking at Nicke, now. Nicke has not looked at him, yet, but he can see Alex watching him from the corner of his eye. Nicke puts his own hand on the queen in the mosaic, the roughness of the jeweled net in her hair against his palm. Alex is still watching him when Nicke turns slowly to face Alex.

“What did you mean,” Nicke asks, voice quiet in the smallness of the distance between them, “about the sun being in her hair?”

“She was called the torch of the underworld,” Alex replies. “It was said, when she unveiled her hair, that it was filled with sunlight, and that her song made plants grow.”

“A deity of life, then,” Nicke says. Alex shrugs, the motion bringing their hands infinitesimally closer.

“Neither she nor her king left any written accounts. There are only legends, and songs.”

Nicke tilts his head, thoughtful. “We have our own stories, you know, about kings with stars in their hair and rock at their fingertips.” Alex smiles, but it is not a particularly happy one, and suddenly the closeness of the little hall feels suffocating. “I don’t like this room,” Nicke says, letting his hand drop from the mosaic. Alex laughs, a genuine, happy sound. He lets his hand fall away as well, although he does not return to the polite distance he generally keeps from Nicke just yet.

“Where would you like to go instead?” Alex asks.

“Surprise me,” Nicke says.

Alex takes him down through the palace and out through the door to the gardens. Instead of taking the garden path, though, they turn the other way, back towards the bridge.

The palace grounds, bounded by the river and only accessible by a single bridge, are not extensive. The palace itself is quite large, and the gardens are big enough to wander around in, but you quickly come upon the river when walking in any direction. From the palace bridge, there is only the one path swirling down the hill, but it has four different exits, one on each side. Nicke generally enters and leaves the palace by the front path, the one that leads to the gates of the underworld. Sometimes he will take the left or the right, to head deeper into the city, but he has never taken the back path.

This path is rougher than the other three, still paved evenly enough but without the neatness or beauty of the other paths. The structures along it are simpler, too, medium to dark browns that seem especially plain after the striking brightness of the palace.

They do not go far. Alex leads him to a small barn, sliding the door open and gesturing for Nicke to follow him inside.

It’s cozy and warm inside, with dimly glowing lamps overhead. The first thing Nicke spots is Dima, propped up in a corner of the barn with three piglets asleep on his lap and a fourth trotting happily around his feet.

“Hi, Nicke,” he says, waving.

“Hi,” Nicke replies, slightly surprised to see Dima away from the observatory. “Not working on the sky today?”

“Oh no,” Dima smiles, scratching the pig that’s butting its head up against his side. “It’s midday. I don’t do the sky except at night. Like the moon, you know?”

“I see,” Nicke says.

“We have visitors!” A man comes in from the other end of the barn, carrying two more piglets in his arms.

“Yes,” Dima says. “This is Nicke, Vova.”

“You know me already,” Alex says, grinning. Nicke rolls his eyes, but the other two laugh good-naturedly.

“Do you want to hold one?” Vova asks. “They just ate, so they’re mostly sleepy, except for Gvozdika. She is always full of energy.”

The piglet who has been frolicking around Dima comes over to Nicke. She sniffs around him curiously for a few seconds, and then snorts and runs back to Dima.

“I don’t think she likes me,” Nicke says uncertainly.

“They are a little shy at first,” Vova says. “Here, hold this one. He is very snuggly.”

Vova puts one of the sleeping piglets carefully in Nicke’s arms. Nicke holds very still, but the piglet just snuffles a little in his sleep and tucks his face in the crook of Nicke’s arm.

The piglets are, objectively, very cute. They’re brown and fuzzy with thick black and white stripes and warm bristled coats. Nicke sits next to Dima on the barn floor, their shoulders pressed together, and lets Gvozdika clamber curiously over his legs.

Alex and Vova are talking quietly in a language Nicke doesn’t understand, and the barn is warm and smells of sweet hay, and the piglet is a soft weight in Nicke’s lap, and he starts to drift a little without entirely realizing it.

Nicke wakes suddenly, some time later. The piglets and Dima are gone, although Nicke is still warm, covered in a soft woolen blanket.

He thinks he is alone, at first, save the mother pig surrounded by her babies at the far end of the barn. Gradually, though, he realizes Alex is still there, standing in the corner of the barn in deepest shadow. He is turned mostly away from Nicke, watching the pigs, but he looks over when he hears Nicke stand.

He is difficult to see, like this, so much in darkness that the silver in his hair fades to near black. Nicke cannot see much more than the gleam of the light catching his eyes, the shift of his head.

“I fell asleep,” Nicke says, caught between warring instincts to move away, to move closer.

“Yes,” Alex says, and looks back at the pigs. Nicke steps closer, out of the light and into the darkness, and looks with him.

—-

“No,” Nicke says firmly, even though he knows that nothing makes Andre whine like a firm rejection.

“You’re no fun,” Andre says, pouting.

“Just because I don’t do every single thing you want?”

Andre skips wheedling and goes right to grabbing at Nicke’s hair. Nicke smacks his hand away, a bit harder than necessary.

“You tore my shirt last time,” Nicke says, but he’s winding his braid up around his head and pinning it in place so Andre just smirks at him, knowing that he’s won.

“Jakub made you a new one. A nicer one, even.” Nicke can’t exactly argue with that. He’s not very particular about clothing, most of his purchases are based more on comfort than anything else, but Jakub is incredibly skilled at both design and sewing. Wearing the new shirt to work was maybe asking for trouble, if the sour look he got from Sasha was any indication, but it’s not like he could walk home shirtless.

Nicke shoves the final pin into his hair particularly viciously, jerking his attention back to the present. He doesn’t want to think about the way the lines between life and death are blurring more and more, the two worlds starting to blend together, a wash of grey instead of stark black and white.

“Same stakes as last time?” Andre asks, bouncing on the balls of his feet a little. “I get to braid your hair if I win?”

“You’re not going to win,” Nicke says flatly. Andre smirks, and charges at him.

Nicke has him on his stomach with one arm twisted behind his back in less than a minute.

“I’ll get you next time,” Andre says.

“I’m starting to think you just like being pinned down,” Nicke says. Andre laughs, and doesn’t try to push him off.

“Nicke,” Dmitrij calls, “come sit for a little. Let my husband have a rest.”

Nicke rolls his eyes, pinching Andre’s side to make him squeal, before getting up and going over to the bar. Their brief wrestling match garnered a bit of amused attention, but at this point most of the patrons have gone back to their drinks. Jakub, pink and giggling on a barstool, pats Nicke on the back.

“What did Andre offer, if you won the match?”

“I don’t take candy from babies,” Nicke says. “At this point I have four brooches, a Fabergé egg, and more crystal files than I know what to do with. He can have this one for free.”

“I have to win at some point,” Andre says, wiggling his way between Nicke’s barstool and Jakub’s and leaning up against the counter.

“Just give it up,” Evgeny says. He’s behind the bar tonight, although Nicke still isn’t sure if he actually works here or just doesn’t accept the concept of spaces being off-limits. “No one gets to touch his hair. It took me twenty minutes to talk him through putting in those mechanical combs when I could have done it in five.”

“My hair has powerful magical abilities,” Nicke points out. “A fact which none of you seem to take seriously.”

“Very serious,” Dima says. “It can bring new things with it.”

Nicke gives Dima a sharp look, unsure if he’s simply being metaphorical or if he actually knows something. Dima has already been distracted by Evgeny trying to toss coins into his glass from behind the bar, though, and the conversation moves on to other things.

Nicke does not notice Alex until much, much later.

It’s strange. For all Alex’s divinity, his godhood rests upon him much differently from Nicke’s. He is cloaked in it, a dark sable that is heavy and immovable. It is not something you can miss, can fail to notice, and yet Alex himself…that is a little different.

Perhaps it is just this: Alex belongs to this kingdom, and its shadows will cover him with a sheltering entirety just as the thinnest ray of sunlight will find Nicke in the world above. Alex is not noticeable if he does not wish to be noticeable, and so Nicke is caught entirely by surprise.

Nicke is passing from one room of the tavern to the next, crossing to greet an acquaintance, when a gleam of silver against the dark wood paneling of the tavern catches his attention. He turns to look, stepping back across the threshold, and there, suddenly, is Alex.

“Oh,” Nicke says, startled. There is a large fireplace, to Alex’s left, and the bulk of it shields them from view of most of the room. “I didn’t realize you were here,” Nicke says, feeling like he should explain his surprise. Of course, Alex has the right to go where he pleases, especially among his own people, but Nicke has not seen him do so. He has only seen Alex out in the full light of the streets, smiling and waving to the crowds that drift around them when Nicke and Alex walk the wide paved paths together.

“I did not mean to startle you,” Alex says, and now that Nicke has seen him, he seems impossible to miss. The jut of shadow, illuminated by flickering firelight, paints him in strikingly harsh lines, terrible and beautiful and uncompromising as death.

_How am I ever meant to look away?_ Nicke thinks, and goes to lean against the wall next to Alex, partly so he cannot stare.

The tavern is noisy and robust, and the doorway is only a few feet away from them, but a strange bubble of, not quite silence, but a settled clarity, gathers around them. Nicke feels as if the two of them are perched between, in that step of nothingness that Cerberus guards, peering down at the world beneath.

“What did you mean to do?” Nicke asks, his voice quiet and clear. He feels Alex breathe next to him, a single, measured inhale.

“I was curious, about what you do here when I am not around.”

“You did not ask me,” Nicke points out. Alex hesitates, and Nicke waits.

“No,” he says finally. Nicke feels him step away from the wall, the shift in the air next to him. “Forgive me, I-” Alex stops, suddenly, when Nicke turns to look directly at him.

He looks uncertain now, all the striking power of him balanced on an edge, and it twists hot and sharp in the base of Nicke’s stomach.

“What did you think,” Nicke asks, sinking back into the wall behind him, “of what you saw?” His hair has stayed pinned, but it is never entirely obedient, and the heat of the room has brought wispy curls out on his forehead and at the nape of his neck. One of these, springing suddenly loose from behind Nicke’s ear, catches Alex’s attention.

“What Andre said,” Alex says slowly, “about your hair.”

Nicke sighs, the mention of Andre, puncturing the tension in the air around them slightly. His eyes flick past Alex, taking in Andre half-asleep at the bar, Dmitrij leaning on an elbow and chatting with Vova, Evgeny being pulled laughing toward a table by someone Nicke doesn’t know. “Which thing about my hair?” Nicke asks. “Andre never shuts up about my hair.” Nicke wishes, sort of, that he had just let Andre touch it that first day. Nothing Nicke said was untrue, he does not like anyone touching it without permission, does not particularly like anyone touching it at all, but Andre is incredibly persistent. A quick brush of his hand, it might have circumvented all the fixated attention created by an absolute prohibition.

“He wants to braid it?” Alex asks. 

“He’s not going to,” Nicke says flatly. “I told him that from the beginning.” Alex does not reply, and Nicke looks back at him, and just like that the entire room disappears again.

The others might not take what Nicke said seriously, that his hair is powerful and therefore dangerous, but Alex does. Nicke can see it, pooling like liquid gold in the expression of his eyes, the full consciousness of what Nicke can do. What surges in Nicke’s blood, what lights up with the sun above, what he carries with him even here, at the remotest end of his domain. Nicke can see the greed with which Alex watches the curl hanging down by Nicke’s ear.

“Good,” Alex says, very softly, and it sinks into Nicke’s blood like fire.

—-

Sergei is not at his post, and the gate by which Nicke comes is unguarded, save Cerberus.

Nicke scratches behind the ears of the head on the left, pats the one in the middle, lets the one on the right, the one a little like a cat, butt its head up against his chest.

This unexpected absence sets him on his guard a little, and the silence along the path to the city makes Nicke quicken his footsteps.

_Where is everyone?_ Nicke wonders, uncertain whether to be disconcerted or annoyed, and irritated at his surprise.

“Come to see your own spectacle?” Sasha asks, appearing at Nicke’s elbow as if from thin air. Nicke swears at him, and Sasha laughs.

“As always, appearing when you are least wanted,” Nicke snaps.

“That is a particular skill of Death,” Sasha says drily.

“Where is everyone?”

Sasha, if possible, grows even more insufferably smug with the knowledge that he has one up on Nicke. “Don’t you know?” Sasha asks, and disappears before Nicke can retaliate.

Unfortunately, Nicke does know, and he hurries down the path with his heart in his stomach.

There is a crowd gathered, spilling across two levels of the city, because in this, at least, Nicke was careful.

There is a patch of land, bare of cobblestone and holding only dry, dead earth, tucked around a bend in the road. And that was the start of it, the appearance of a tiny seedling in that earth, where Nicke’s feet had crossed, but that was not the end of it.

The bend in the road comes straight out onto a small staircase, cut into the earth to compensate for a little unevenness in the ground, and the shadow of that staircase shelters entirely the inside of the bend. That is where Nicke moved the little seedling, into a tiny crook of space barely a foot wide and entirely in darkness. That is where he stops, on his way home when everyone is in their houses or the tavern and the streets are quiet, where he unpins his hair and runs his hands over the earth. He knew that it would not stay hidden forever, but he could not bring himself to abandon it.

They've found his little patch, the offspring of that single seed. Strawberries, red and small and close to the ground, because that is not such a step, really, from what grows here naturally.

They wither, if anyone tries to pluck them, save Nicke. And he is cruel, sometimes, and teasing maybe, but Andre looks so sad about it that Nicke feeds him a strawberry from his own hands. It’s the young ones watching, mostly, too young to mark this, more than Nicke bearing the jonquil, more than Nicke unloosing his hair here, more than Nicke wearing clothes that are cut and sewn here, and jewelry mined and forged here.

But Nicke is sure, before he bends to pluck the berry from the earth, that Alex is watching from the bend in the road, and Alex, certainly, is old enough to know what it means.

—-

There are dinners at the palace often, and Nicke sometimes attends them. He does not eat or drink, but then, that is also true when he spends evenings at the tavern.

His presence is not noted so much now, not new or particularly shocking, but when food is passed around or toasts proposed there is always a careful and precise, almost choreographed, avoidance of Nicke.

There is only ever one moment, near the beginning of the night, when Alex offers him the platter, and Nicke refuses. It is unfailingly the same, this dance. The only variation since Nicke’s arrival is the disappearance of the gold platter, changed for a flat silver one with a butterfly sketched on the underside a few weeks ago.

Alex offers him the platter, as always, and the table goes silent when Nicke unexpectedly picks up a pomegranate. He peels it, thick skin yielding easily to the glow at his fingertips. He takes a single kernel, rolling it between his fingers. Toying with the attention of the hall.

Finally, he crushes it, watches the juice drain from it, and wipes his hands on the cloth the attendant hurries to provide, smiling at the gasps and shock reverberating around the hall.

“That was cruel, to toy with them,” Alex says, soft in his ear, once talk has started up again.

Nicke looks at him, still carefully a few inches distant, and Alex’s eyes are hot, but not with anger. Nicke’s fingers throb, power gathering and pooling in the tips of them.

_Do something about it, then,_ Nicke thinks, but in response he only smiles.

—-

Sasha is leaning against the circulation desk when Nicke comes into work, and he follows Nicke back into the staff only area when Nicke tries to at least get his coat off before he gets into an argument.

“I hear you have a penchant for making stupid wagers,” Sasha says.

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“It’s not a stupid wager if you don’t risk anything.”

Nicke smirks. “Exactly.”

Sasha raises an eyebrow, regarding Nicke thoughtfully. “Do you only take bets you know you’ll win?”

“Where are you going with this?” Nicke asks, suspicious.

“Well,” Sasha says, drawing out the word, “the thing is, you broke a rule.”

“What rule,” Nicke snaps, although he knows very well what Sasha means.

Sasha’s hand darts out, lightning-fast, and he seizes Nicke’s wrist. Nicke tries to jerk his hand away, but Sasha’s grip tightens and Nicke is afraid if he keeps struggling he’ll damage the jonquil. “This,” Sasha says, tapping his finger on the metal flower, “is a bargain between you and Alex. You and I,” Sasha releases his wrist, and Nicke carefully straightens the bangle, glowering at Sasha, “have no such understanding.”

“So?” Nicke says rudely.

“So,” Sasha says, “the strawberries? You brought something from here over there. Don’t pretend you don’t know that isn’t allowed.”

“I didn’t bring them,” Nicke argues. “I just grew them.”

“Get rid of them,” Sasha says, leaning back and folding his arms.

Nicke pauses, evaluating Sasha’s expression. This can’t be about the strawberries entirely. Sasha could have just gotten rid of them himself, easily enough. “Or?” Nicke asks.

“Or,” Sasha says, drawing out the word, “the two of us make our own bargain.”

“That, historically, is not a wise idea,” Nicke points out.

“I’m not after your death,” Sasha snaps, “that isn’t mine, anyway. I want something else.”

“My strawberries?” Nicke asks, suspiciously. What is this about, really?

“I’ll ask again,” Sasha says, “do you only take bets you know you’ll win?”

Nicke regards him. This is, objectively, a bad idea. What enticement does Sasha even have to offer, other than allowing Nicke to keep his garden? “What’s the game?” Nicke asks.

“I’ve hidden a particular duck egg-”

“No,” Nicke interrupts.

“Fine. What do you suggest?”

“Chess is traditional,” Nicke says. “Where I come from, anyway.”

“Chess is boring,” Sasha says. “Racing?”

“What kind?”

Sasha shrugs. “I’m sure Zhenya has some sort of gadgets we can use. You pick one, I pick one, whichever wins claims the forfeit.”

“You still haven’t offered me anything,” Nicke points out.

“You don’t have to kill your strawberries.”

“I want more than that,” Nicke says.

“What, then?” Sasha asks, impatiently.

Nicke thinks quickly, trying to come up with something Sasha will not want to lose. “Your necklace,” he says triumphantly.

“This?” Sasha asks, tugging at the gold chain that is always around his neck. A small carved eagle drops out of his shirt collar.

“Yes, that.”

“It’s not magical,” Sasha says, and with the way his hand closes over it Nicke knows his guess was correct. It’s important to him.

“I don’t care,” Nicke says, because he doesn’t. He wants Sasha’s anger, possibly even humiliation, not his power.

“Fine,” Sasha snaps. “Tomorrow, then.” He holds out a hand, slightly taunting.

“Tomorrow,” Nicke says firmly, shaking his hand. He is so caught up in his imagined victory over Sasha that he doesn’t realize until Sasha is nearly out of the room that they had never agreed on his part of the stakes. “Wait,” Nicke says. “What is it you want?”

“Oh,” Sasha says, and Nicke realizes, with a sinking feeling, that he has been led into deeper water than he thought, “you’ll find that out tomorrow.”

—-

“Can I be your second?” Andre asks excitedly.

“It’s not a duel,” Nicke snaps. He’s so annoyed with himself that he’s lapsed back into old habits, dark clothing and a beanie pulled down entirely over his hair. “It’s a race.”

“Is that why you’re dressed like a cartoon burglar?” Andre asks.

Andre is saved from being shoved into a rather angular bench by the arrival of Evgeny with the combatants.

“No cheating by shooting magic at my guys,” Evgeny says, eyeing Nicke and Sasha with equal suspicion. “If you break them I put snakes in your bed.”

“You don’t have access to my bed,” Nicke says primly.

“That’s what you think,” Evgeny says. “I have a lot of aunts and they go all over. My snake range is everywhere.”

“No magic,” Sasha says, beaming angelically.

“No magic,” Nicke agrees sulkily.

“Good.” Evgeny pulls the coverings off to reveal two large birdcages. Inside each is what at first appears to be a bird. When Nicke looks closer, he sees that they are, in fact, mechanical alkonosts. Their wings are a vibrant blue, but beating too quickly for Nicke to get more than a blurred glimpse of the individually carved feathers, and their hair is black and made of tiny wires that, somehow, move almost like real hair in the wind.

Evgeny bows at the appreciative oohs and ahhs of the audience.

“Will they race?” Nicke asks. He does not doubt Evgeny’s skill with machinery, but the alkonosts seem to be more interested in fluttering from bar to bar to peer out at the crowd and letting out the occasional warble than in freedom or victory.

“Oh yes,” Evgeny says. “Once, all the way around the square. Starting and finishing at this line, here.” He takes out a piece of chalk, drawing a thick white line on the ground. He stands up, brushing the dust from his hands, and then claps them briskly. “Okay guys, davai!”

At the command, the alkonosts change suddenly. Their feathers flip over as a wave of crimson sweeps down their wings, and their cries turn harsh and menacing. One of them flies directly into the bars, nearly upending the cage. Andre takes a sizeable step back, no longer so eager to be involved in the race.

Evgeny has both Sasha and Nicke unlock their respective birdcages and hold onto the doors. “On my count,” he says. “Three, two, one, go!”

Nicke and Sasha open the birdcage doors, and immediately both alkonosts burst out into the air, speeding furiously for the far end of the square. Although the square is quite sizeable, the race is fairly easy to follow because the wings of the alkonosts are bright and flashing and quite eye catching against the plain tiling of the square. It’s a close race, if not a particularly long one, and the audience is pretty well split between cheering for Sasha’s bird and cheering for Nicke’s.

Sasha seems to lose all interest in what’s happening once the alkonosts take off, standing by Evgeny with a bored expression, and Nicke is too busy clenching his teeth and silently willing his alkonost to go faster to say much. Nicke wishes they’d chosen a contest he could have more control over. This is essentially a prolonged coin flip.

The crowd gets exponentially more unruly as the race draws to a close, Sasha’s alkonost inching ahead as the machines barrel down the final stretch toward the chalk line.

_What was I thinking, agreeing to this_, Nicke scolds himself as Sasha’s alkonost whizzes across the line just ahead of Nicke’s, landing atop its cage with a proud chirrup. Its feathers flip end over end, turning blue again, and by the time Nicke’s alkonost lands Sasha’s is entirely still, machinery gone dormant.

Sasha and Evgeny embrace in celebration, and Nicke glares at them, ignoring the noise of the others and Andre’s attempt to give him a consoling pat on the back.

“It’s not fair,” Nicke says to Evgeny. “We should have had a neutral party create the racers. Obviously your boyfriend is going to win.”

“You didn’t have a problem with it before you lost,” Sasha says blithely, seemingly unconcerned with the slight on his honor.

“First of all,” Evgeny says, poking Nicke in the chest with a finger, “no one can make what I make, so good luck with that. Second of all, my boyfriend can make idiot bets all by himself without my help, just like you.”

“Whatever,” Nicke grumbles, but he lets it go. He shudders to think what Sasha’s idea of a bet forfeit possibly is, but it’s his own fault for agreeing to this stupid contest in the first place, instead of a nice reasonable game of chess.

The loss itself is galling enough, but as the crowd disperses, Sasha nearly wanders off without telling Nicke whatever horrifying idea he has in store. As if this whole thing wasn’t Sasha’s idea, to begin with, and now he has the nerve to act like it doesn’t even matter.

Nicke grabs his elbow before he can leave, towing him into the observatory so the remainder of the crowd can’t hear them. Evgeny has gone to bring the alkonosts back to his workshop, and Andre had to rush to the salon right after the race to meet a client, so it’s just the two of them.

“Well?” Nicke grinds out, when Sasha still doesn’t say anything.

“Well what?”

Nicke knows he’s being deliberately provoking, he does, but he still has to fight the urge not to shove Sasha into the wall. “What do you want for winning the bet?” Nicke snaps.

“Oh,” Sasha smirks at him, leaning back and folding his arms. “I want the same stakes as Andre.”

This is not what Nicke expected. He gives Sasha a suspicious look. “You want to brush my hair,” he says flatly. He doesn’t think that would be particularly pleasant for either of them. Their magic is too different, too opposed, the giving of life and the taking of it.

“No,” Sasha says, and Nicke is a little insulted by the look of distaste that flashes across his face even though it’s just Sasha coming to the same conclusion as Nicke has, “for Alex.”

“You can’t make a bet on someone else’s behalf,” Nicke argues, loudly, so he can drown out all the other things that pop into his head at this.

“Sure I can,” Sasha says. “Good game,” he adds, smacking Nicke on the shoulder and then ducking out the door before Nicke can argue further.

“What the _fuck_,” Nicke asks the silent observatory.

—-

Unfortunately, avoiding the situation entirely is not a possibility, both because Sasha can follow him into the mortal world and because of Nicke’s pride. The first thing he does is go to the tavern to borrow a basket. It’s fortunately still early in the day, since the race was scheduled for the morning, and so hardly anyone is there except for a few people having an early lunch.

Nicke goes and pulls up all the strawberries, uprooting the plants ruthlessly and draining any life from the soil until it is as cold and dead as it was when he arrives. Then he goes home.

Alex did not come to the race.

Alex has been measuredly the same, the past couple of weeks. The strawberry patch, their conversation the night at the tavern, the night with the pigs, have not come up. Alex has been distant, and polite, and the space he keeps between them is so exact Nicke could trace it, mold it in wax, let it set, immovable.

Nicke rips up the strawberries, not bothering with a knife, just tearing them apart with his hands. His hands, after all, are certain, it’s the rest of him he isn’t sure about. He squeezes lemon juice into the strawberries, adds sugar, and heat, and stirs until it’s thick and even.

He stares at the three jars lined up on the counter, the dark dull red of them.

None of this is easy, not even to think about. Not being trapped in this life he never wanted, unable to go home, unable to stay here. Not being trapped, again, differently, in the underworld.

Sometimes it feels so heavy, sometimes it feels like Nicke has been doing nothing for the past seven years but beating his own hands raw on a door that will not open. Sometimes it feels like weeds sprouting up into his throat, like he can’t breathe through the dirt they grow in, the furious impossible anger of having life insolently pressed into his every atom. He cannot uproot it, blot it out, unmake it, no matter how many lives his hands and his hair and his footsteps on the earth make. The life will not come out of him, and it will not return to her, and that balance will not invert no matter the level of control or will or power Nicke exerts over his life or his magic.

Alex did not come to the race. Nicke has been living here for a year and barely knows anyone. He keeps wandering into a strange kingdom on grace and the reflected light of his birth, and none of it is easy to think about.

He thinks about moving again, for the fourth time in seven years. He thinks about pushing the jam jars off the counter, in one sweeping arc. About the smash of glass breaking, the red of it splattering over the floor, covering his feet.

_The problem is,_ Nicke thinks, _that the anger never lasts long enough._

—-

Once, when Nicke was four years old, he cut all his hair off. It hung down almost down to his elbows already, and was always in the way, and on a particularly unpleasantly hot summer day he dragged his step-stool into the kitchen, and took the scissors out of the drawer in the kitchen, and cut it off.

His mother was angrier about the scissors than the hair, but mostly Nicke just remembers her evening it up afterward. The little snips of hair lit up like fireflies as she cut them, and Nicke kept giggling and trying to catch them.

After the hair was swept up and Nicke was in a clean t-shirt, ready to go back outside, she had knelt in front of him and looked at him seriously.

“Next time, just ask me to cut it, okay? You’re not supposed to use those scissors.”

Nicke had made it about a day and a half before he had regretted it, missing the weight of his hair and his mother brushing it in the mornings, the way he could dangle it over his shoulder in the garden to make the flowers sway toward him. When he complained, his mother had just smiled at him, and told him it would grow back before he knew it.

It grew past his shoulders that night, while he slept, and was back to its former length by the end of the week. He started learning how to braid, and vowed he would never cut it again.

He never did, not until the day before his mother’s funeral. It took him forever, to saw through the thickness of it, and he left the ends messy and mangled from the scissors, didn’t bother with anything more than a black band to keep the remainder out of his eyes.

But he washed it before he cut it, and braided azalea flowers into it, and coiled the braid on his mother’s chest before they buried her. She would be quick to return to the earth, Nicke knew, as soon as the sun could no longer see her. The remains of her body would disappear, break down and decompose and be consumed, even her bones turning to dust before the flowers in Nicke’s braid had time to fade.

It comforted him at the time, that some of him was there to keep vigil, until she was gone entirely. It comforted him, but the feeling of it kept spreading until it turned stifling, until Nicke had to get away from the earth he could feel covering him.

—-

Nicke manages to avoid Sasha successfully for almost a week. Nicke is picking at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he’s heartily sick of them at this point, on a bench outside the library when Sasha looms over him.

“You’re blocking the sun,” Nicke grumbles, tucking his chin into his scarf. It’s really too cold to be eating outside. Sasha rolls his eyes.

“If I’d known you were going to be such a baby about this,” Sasha says, shoving Nicke over slightly so he can sit on the bench, “I wouldn’t have suggested the bet.”

“I got rid of the strawberries,” Nicke says. He crumples up the wrapping for his sandwich, squeezing it tightly in one hand.

“Whatever,” Sasha says. “Here.” He hands Nicke a small piece of paper, thick and folded several times. “Just read it,” he adds, exasperated, when Nicke looks at him in confusion.

Nicke unfolds the note, reading _Sasha’s an idiot and Alex won’t stop sulking. Andre’s getting on even Dima’s nerves. Get down here tomorrow, I wasn’t kidding about the snakes._

“He says you’re an idiot,” Nicke says.

“He says that to my face, too,” Sasha says, unconcerned. He tilts his face up to the sun, closing his eyes.

Sasha doesn’t seem inclined to say more than that, content to just sit in silence for the remainder of their lunch, so Nicke lets it be. He doesn’t ask about Alex, or the bet. He lets himself feel relieved, by the note and by the sun and silence, for the next seven minutes. Then he resolutely walls those feelings back up, and goes to work.

—-

He considers stopping by Evgeny’s workshop, but in the end he just goes straight to the palace, to get it over with.

It’s late, Nicke wanted to wait until the streets were empty, and he has his beanie pulled low over his ears so the brightness of his hair is hooded entirely. He takes the fastest route to the palace, both because he wants to avoid being seen, if possible, and because he does not particularly want to see the place on his usual route where the strawberries grew. Not yet, anyway.

The doors to the palace are closed for the evening, but they are never barred and they swing open quietly when Nicke pushes them. He isn’t entirely sure where to find Alex, but he tries the library first. That is usually where they are, when Nicke stays into the evening.

Nicke doesn’t know what form Alex’s ‘sulking,’ as Evgeny described it, takes. Andre, he can guess. He isn’t entirely sure what to expect. When he sees Alex, though, Alex jumps up and backs away from him, looking as startled as if Nicke had burst in brandishing a sword.

“Sorry,” Nicke says, hesitating with his hand still on the library door. Alex had been in a chair near the door, but now he’s all the way over by the fireplace. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” Alex still doesn’t say anything, just stares at Nicke with wide, almost frightened eyes. Nicke sees his throat move as he swallows. “I sort of thought you could tell, when I come into the kingdom.” Nicke forces himself to stop talking; he can feel the urge to babble rising with every second of Alex’s silence.

“No, just Sasha can do that,” Alex says, finally. “I can’t. Not until you’re close.” _How close?_, Nicke wants to ask.

“I can go,” Nicke says turning half toward the door to hide his half-frustrated half-embarrassed flush. “I’m sorry if-”

“No!” Alex says, taking a step toward Nicke and then jerking to a halt. “No,” he repeats more calmly, when Nicke looks over at him. “Stay. Here.” Alex moves the chair Nicke favors, usually by the fireplace but currently pushed back against the wall, back into its place. He bows slightly and gestures to the chair, resorting to a formality that hasn’t existed between them in months.

“Thank you,” Nicke says, sitting. Alex goes to start the fire. Nicke almost tells him not to bother, it is drafty as it always is in the palace but Nicke already feels like enough of an imposition, but he wants to give Alex the time to regain his equilibrium if he needs it. “Did Sasha not tell you I was coming?” Nicke asks finally, once the fire is starting to blaze and Alex has retreated back to his chair a few feet away.

“I didn’t ask him to,” Alex says, so close on the heels of Nicke’s question that Nicke is not entirely sure it is meant as an answer. Indeed, Alex winces and shakes his head a second later. “I mean, yes, he mentioned you might be back today. I didn’t ask him to…about the other thing.”

Nicke frowns, parsing this. What other thing? “The bet?” he asks finally. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” Alex says emphatically. “I would never-”

“I know that,” Nicke interrupts, stomach curdling. The possibility had never even occurred to him, it would be so utterly unlike Alex. Is that why Alex looks so terrified? Does Alex think he is here to force some sort of collection, some un-offered intimacy? This is part of why Nicke waited a week, to have this conversation, and the sick-sour feeling of having his fears realized presses him down into the chair like a weight.

Alex always offers him the platter at dinner, but he is not what anyone would call pressing.

This, at first, pleased Nicke. He likes to come and go as he pleases, to not have his liberty imposed on, to do what he likes in the kingdom. He likes, even, to be given the little gifts, from Alex and the others, the ones the taking of which does not oblige him to give anything in return.

This, later, especially lately, does not please Nicke. He dislikes the idea of being followed about, fawned over, given empty complements, flattered and coaxed and eyed like another jeweled flower. He has no desire to be an ornament.

Still, there is a throne that is empty. While he is glad Alex does not pursue him as a thing to be collected, he wonders, increasingly often, if there is another meaning to this distance, entirely.

He could take the platter, eat of it, and have the throne. There is no platter for him to offer to Alex, and sometimes Nicke wonders if, perhaps, Alex prefers the throne empty after all.

Alex is still watching him, looks as if he is waiting for Nicke to deal him some blow, and Nicke does not know what to say. He breathes in, careful and measured and quiet, and then he slips the jonquil off his wrist.

“Nicke,” Alex says, looking up at Nicke imploringly as Nicke steps toward him. It sounds ripped out of him, and Nicke is more confused than ever.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he says, honestly. “If you are upset by my presence here, if you find it an imposition, I don’t want…” Nicke trails off. Alex is shaking his head.

“No, Nicke, no.” Alex starts to lift his hand, and then presses it back against the chair, curving it so hard around the edge that his knuckles turn white. Nicke is still standing over him, still holding the jonquil in his hand, eyes caught on Alex’s hands against the red of the chair, the long line of Alex’s throat.

“What, then?” Nicke asks, voice half-fledged in the smallness of the space between them.

“I didn’t think,” Alex says slowly, “that you were coming back.”

Nicke frowns. “Why wouldn’t I come back? Of course I planned to come back.” He should probably step back. Alex is still craning his neck to look up at him.

“I thought,” Alex swallows, and squirms a little under Nicke’s gaze, but he still doesn’t look away. “I thought you were angry, because of what Sasha said.”

“Angry?” Nicke feels stupid and slow, confused, but he can’t seem to access the accompanying frustration or shame. He feels trapped in something thick and heavy, but with Alex’s bare throat pinned under his gaze he has no urge to speed things back up.

Alex’s eyes flicker, go dark, pulling Nicke in until he loses track of everything but the tiny expressions flitting across Alex’s face, the tempo of his breath. “I’d never touch you like that,” Alex says, so quiet that Nicke sways a little closer, “not if you didn’t want me to.”

“I know,” Nicke says, just as quiet. Some of the tension goes out of Alex’s posture.

“Good,” Alex says. “I want you to feel safe here, Nicke.” The tilt of his throat turns pleading, an intentional vulnerability. Nicke wants to get closer, let his palms fall on his shoulders, but that is hardly a new feeling, where Alex is concerned.

“I do,” Nicke says, and forces himself to take a step back. He resumes his seat, still watching Alex, and slides the jonquil back onto his wrist. He sees only relief, in Alex’s expression, so that fear, at least, is laid to rest. Alex does not wish him entirely gone.

“I think Sasha was trying to say the same thing, really,” Alex says, talking fast now. “He was so rude to you when you first got here. He wants you to feel welcome, you know?” Nicke has a lot of things to say in response to this, but none of them are polite and most of them are probably best reserved for Sasha himself, so he just nods. “Everyone likes you so much here.” Alex keeps talking, saying something about Andre and Dmitrij and Jakub, and something cold slips down Nicke’s spine.

“Is that why you were worried I wouldn’t come back?” Nicke asks, twisting his bracelet until it is perfectly upright, aligned. “You thought they’d be disappointed?”

“Of course I want my people to be happy,” Alex says slowly. He looks wary and Nicke feels tired, suddenly, and reckless.

“Just them?” he asks. Alex opens his mouth, but Nicke holds up a hand. “I’m not going to just stop coming here, Alex, not while I have friends here and while you permit it, but I want an honest answer. Was it just for their sake, that you wished for my return, or for your own as well?”

Alex is silent for almost a minute, and his eyes on Nicke are anguished. Even for as many times as Nicke has thought this was happening, that Alex was finally confirming that there can never be anything like happiness between them over the past hour, it stings. Again, and fresh, and sharp, even as many times as Nicke has rehearsed this conversation over the past week. Nicke is used to biting down on his own pain, though, so he resolutely thinks of the others, and says, gently, “It’s okay if the answer is no. I told you, I’m not going to stop coming, so long as my presence is not an imposition.”

Alex is still looking at Nicke like Nicke is tormenting him, and Nicke is rapidly coming around to the end of his patience and entering annoyance. What right does Alex have, to look like that? He’s not the one being rejected here. Alex finally answers, though, cutting into Nicke’s angry mental formulation of a response.

“Why did you leave for so long, if not because of what Sasha said?” Alex asks. This throws Nicke, a little. He isn’t expecting it, and so he answers, perhaps, too honestly.

“It was because of what Sasha said,” Nicke says.

Alex frowns. “But you said-”

“Not because I thought you had put him up to it,” Nicke interrupts. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t make me angry.”

“I don’t understand,” Alex says, and he’s starting to look frustrated too. This makes Nicke feel, perversely, better. At least he’s not the only one annoyed. At least Alex doesn’t look so sad anymore. “Why would it make you angry?”

“You’re the one who said you thought it made me angry,” Nicke snaps.

“Because of me,” Alex says, fingers drumming on the arms of his chair. “I thought you-”

“I know what you thought.”

“Then why won’t you just answer the question!” Alex is not yelling, but this is the first time he has raised his voice above a polite level in the entire time Nicke has known him. It makes Nicke want to push harder.

“I did,” Nicke says, intentionally prim.

“You didn’t.”

Nicke leans forward slightly in his chair. He’s lost track of what the question even is, at this point. “I did,” he says, deliberate.

Alex glares at him, a controlled, defiant fury that refuses to either advance or retreat, and it catapults Nicke backward to the first time they met. To the way his first glance of Alex felt like stepping onto solid ground and sinking into quicksand, to that one, poorly angled diversion of Alex’s power into the flower at Nicke’s fingertips. It goes through him like lightning striking a tree, incandescent and devastating, and his anger drains out of him all at once.

“I didn’t want to see your face look like it did earlier,” Nicke says, quiet again, and Alex freezes half between anger and confusion. “That’s why the bet made me angry.” Nicke swallows, looks away from Alex for the first time in the conversation. “You don’t say no to me, Alex, you never do. I don’t want to force you to do something you don’t want to any more than you do me. I didn’t want to know, what you would look like, trying to find the way to tell me no. I didn’t like that Sasha forced that.”

“Nicke,” Alex says, and waits. Nicke closes his eyes, breathes, and looks at him. This, more than the rest of the evening together, is hard to look at. It feels like forcing his own hand into a fire, holding it there. He does not know why this is heavier and more terrifying than Alex pushing him away, Alex trying to find a polite way to reject him, Alex’s scorn, Alex’s anger, but it is. It makes him want to flinch into himself, to be looked at like he is something infinitely precious, just at the edge of grasp. “I don’t tell you no because I don’t want to, not because I feel like I have to.”

“Not even because you’re afraid I’ll leave?” Nicke asks, and he doesn’t want to do this either. Doesn’t want to see the flicker of acknowledgment in Alex’s eyes.

“That’s not fair.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not,” Alex sighs, “that’s not because I feel like I have to. I just want you to be happy, here. I want to make you happy.”

“And I just want you to be honest with me,” Nicke says, frustrated. “Not,” he waves a hand, “trapped by all this ceremony and history.”

“Trapped?” Alex says, confused. “Trapped by what?”

Nicke blinks at him, startled. “By…by everything,” he says. This is so basic to his interpretation of Alex that Alex’s lack of immediate understanding throws him off. “By the empty throne, and the platter, and the mosaics, and the kingdom, and life and death.”

Alex is still frowning at him, but more thoughtfully than anything else. “That’s just how things are,” Alex says. “How things have always been, as long as I’ve lived here.”

“Then how can you know,” Nicke says, “what you really want?”

Alex’s face closes off. Not entirely, Nicke isn’t sure it’s capable of that, but enough. “That’s sort of condescending, Nicke,” he says sharply. “I’m not a child, not even by divine reckoning. I know what I want.”

“But how can you, if you haven’t experienced anything else,” Nicke points out.

“If your opinion of my decision-making is so low,” Alex says, with stiff formality, “no wonder you disappeared for a week. I rather wonder you came back here at all.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Nicke says, frustrated, but he reluctantly has to acknowledge that Alex has a point. Nicke can’t, really, defend either belief now that he’s articulated them: that Alex is entirely helpless in this situation, or that Alex is lying about what he wants and feels out of what? A half-formed phantom obligation?

Alex is looking at the fire, his jaw set and eyes hard, and it makes Nicke’s breath catch a little, even now. Maybe especially now, tumbling, finally, past the strained formal distance that Nicke has been frustrated by and yet seemingly unable to cross.

For the first time, Nicke acknowledges to himself that he is getting in deep with Alex, deeper than he can come back from, maybe, and that this is not something he is going to be able to leave behind. It's not that he has decided anything yet, not permanently anyway, but he suspects he is on a path that is fast approaching such a decision. And, for all of that, Nicke is not certain that he has strength to wrench himself away from such a path, or the temperament to desire it.

“I’m sorry,” Nicke says quietly. “You’re right.” Alex’s eyes dart back over to him, still wary but already softening, and Nicke feels the strange, frustrating urge to protect Alex from himself. Alex deserves better than this, all of Nicke’s uncertainty and anger and sharp, jagged edges. “I am happy here, you know,” Nicke says. “You do make me happy, Alex.”

“Nicke,” Alex says, and it slams into Nicke heavy and fast like a snowmelt. Alex looks like outstretched palms, pleading and hungry, and Nicke has never wanted so badly to touch him as he does right now.

“Honesty, then?” Nicke asks. “From both of us?”

Alex nods, solemn. Nicke breathes in, holds it for a few seconds, lets it sigh out of him. He needs to leave before he does something stupid, before he asks the question that has been burning in the back of his mind since that moment in the observatory last week. Since before that, if he’s being honest with himself.

“I need to go home and sleep,” Nicke says. “I’ll be back tomorrow, though, to see the others.”

“Good,” Alex says, standing when Nicke does, automatic. He hesitates, slightly, halfway to the door, and Nicke looks at him inquiringly. Alex swallows, fiddles with a stack of books on the end table next to them. Nicke waits, trusting that Alex will say what he wants to say. “The others, they give you things sometimes, yes?”

“Yes,” Nicke says. “Mostly clothes and jewelry.” He smiles a little. “Andre is always giving me manicure sets. I think he’s convinced if he does it often enough I’ll actually use them.” Alex smiles, and looks down, almost shyly.

“Can I give you something?” Alex asks.

“If you want to,” Nicke says, after thinking about it for a moment to make certain that is his actual answer. Alex smiles at him, bright and happy, and goes over to open a drawer from his desk in the corner. He brings over a small box, neatly wrapped in plain blue paper, and holds it out to Nicke.

Nicke slips a finger under the edge of the paper, tears it away from the box carefully. It feels solid in his hands, although not heavy, and when he opens it he sees a necklace resting on a velvet cushion.

It’s a solitaire pear garnet in a simple gold setting, hanging from a gold chain. It’s beautiful, the red of the gem flashing out in the firelight when Nicke holds it up to admire it. Nicke smiles, holding it out to Alex. “Will you put it on?” he asks.

Alex nods, taking the necklace from Nicke’s outstretched hand and stepping behind him. Nicke’s hair is still tucked up under his beanie, so he does not need to lift it out of the way. Alex fastens the clasp carefully, the gem settling cool and heavy on Nicke’s chest. Nicke is immediately distracted from this sensation by the feel of Alex’s fingertips, gently setting the clasp against Nicke’s neck and lingering there for a few charged seconds. They are warm, and so soft they almost tickle, and Nicke is suddenly, desperately, tempted to lean back into them.

Alex lets his hand drop, and Nicke composes his expression into something resembling a friendly but detached smile, and he walks out of the palace with a slow and measured step.

He holds the garnet in his hand all the way home, running it between his fingers and pressing against the facets until they bite.

He does not turn on any of the lights, walking the route to his bedroom in the quiet, familiar dark of his house, but he lights the several pillar candles scattered around his room. Nicke undresses for bed, settling himself on the stool in front of his vanity, and then, finally, pulls his beanie off.

Nicke takes his hair down slowly. It’s always an undertaking because there is so much of it, especially when he’s had it pinned all the way up. Once the pins are out and the braid is loose, then he undoes the tie on the end of his braid and starts finger-combing it out, careful inch by inch. One that is all finished, his hair entirely loose around his shoulders, he brushes it, slowly and methodically, until it is soft and gleaming in the candlelight.

Usually, then, Nicke goes to bed, but tonight he sits and watches himself in the mirror, fascinated by the dark, glimmering red of the garnet against his bare skin. He lets a few strands of hair slip to the front, dipping his shoulder and then twining them through his fingers. They gleam almost red in the reflected light of the gem.

Slowly, Nicke lets his eyes drop closed, sinking into the feeling of his hair unbound, his body free and unobserved. He lets the tips of two fingers settle against the back of his neck, flush against his skin just over where the chain of the necklace lies. The candlelight flickers warm and orange-red against his closed eyelids, and Nicke smiles.

—-

Nicke dresses carefully, the next morning: a white high-necked tunic with loose mid-length sleeves over dark red leggings, both Jakub’s creations. He braids his hair and pins it into a coronet but leaves it uncovered, carefully adding the finishing touch of Evgeny’s butterfly combs. Nicke does not particularly like making apologies, and he is not looking forward to this, but at least with things somewhat settled with Alex this feels like a tangible and achievable step. Still, he’ll do as much as he can with presentation, before he gets to speech.

Evgeny is waiting for him, this time perched like a gangly bird atop one of the large wooden posts of the quay, when Nicke steps out of the little swan-boat. He gives Nicke a slow, evaluating look, raising an eyebrow.

“Overdoing it a little,” he says.

“Shut up,” Nicke grumbles. Evgeny laughs, hopping down to walk with him.

“You’re gonna end up with those aquarium nails before he lets you leave.”

“We have a no gels or acrylics agreement.”

“No, you HAD a no gels or acrylics agreement.”

“Stop following me,” Nicke complains. “I was going to come apologize to you later.”

“That’s okay,” Evgeny says. “I’ll just take watching you deal with Andre.”

“You’re a sadist.”

“Hey, I didn’t let Sasha go spy on you and Alex yesterday.”

Nicke sighs. Evgeny doesn’t sound hurt, or annoyed, but he wouldn’t. Nicke stops, turns to look at him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have disappeared for so long, not without at least sending word.”

“No,” Evgeny says. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Thank you for not sending snakes after me.”

Evgeny laughs, shaking his head. “Just don’t do it again, okay?”

“Okay,” Nicke says. He sighs. “What am I going to do about Andre?” Evgeny opens his mouth, and Nicke glares at him. “You better not say aquarium nails.” Evgeny closes his mouth.

As it turns out, Andre is too busy to see Nicke.

“I’m too busy to see you right now,” Andre says loudly, refusing to look over at Nicke and focusing on straightening out his station. Not only does Andre not have a client, but the entire salon is empty and closed for lunch.

“You look really busy,” Evgeny says, because he is, at least, an equal opportunity tormentor.

“Fine, I’ll come back another day,” Nicke says, starting toward the salon door. He does not get far, because Andre shoots across the salon and slams into Nicke from behind, wrapping his arms around his middle and clinging tightly. Nicke almost flips him, thinking Andre is trying to get the jump on him wrestling-wise, but he realizes after a few seconds that Andre is just trying to hug him.

“You were gone for forever,” Andre says, sniffling a little.

“Don’t get snot on my shoulder,” Nicke grumbles, even though, as predicted, it just makes Andre burrow in harder.

“I even asked Sasha about you,” Andre says, accusingly.

“He’s scared of Sasha,” Evgeny comments.

“I have sense, don’t I?” Andre says, propping his head on Nicke’s shoulder so he can see Evgeny.

“That’s debatable,” Nicke says. Andre pinches his side, and Nicke makes a heroic effort not to smack his hand. He’d like to breathe again some time this week, and that requires talking Andre out of keeping him in the underworld by the simple expedient of wrapping himself around Nicke and never letting go. Getting into a petty squabble, as tempting as it is, will just prolong the discussion. “I’m not leaving right now,” Nicke says pointedly. “In fact, I would enjoy sitting down, resting a bit even.”

Andre releases him immediately, which really should have made Nicke suspicious. It’s not until Nicke has settled himself into one of the comfortable armchairs in the waiting area at the salon, though, that he realizes his error. Like this, Andre can (and will) simply climb on top of him.

“My legs are going to fall asleep in about a minute,” Nicke grumbles, over the sound of Evgeny cackling.

“It’s what you deserve,” Andre says, wiggling to get comfortable and draping his legs over the arm of the chair. He elbows Nicke directly in the stomach during this process, which may or may not be intentional.

“Are you quite finished,” Nicke asks, once Andre has situated himself.

“No,” Andre says airily. “I’m just getting comfortable so I can think about how you’re going to make this up to me.”

“I’ll let you two catch up,” Evgeny says, heading for the door now that his horrible need to see Nicke suffer has been satiated.

“Bye, Kuz,” Andre says, before turning back to Nicke. “Can I do your hair?”

“You know I’m going to say no.”

“Worth a try.” Andre shrugs. He taps his chin in obnoxious contemplation.

“I’m going to shove you off,” Nicke says, but its more for form’s sake than anything else. He would never go so far as to admit that he’s missed Andre’s particular form of aggressively friendly physicality, but it’s not terrible, being back. It was a long week.

“You aren’t allowed to be mean to me today,” Andre pouts. “You abandoned me for a whole week.”

“I didn’t abandon you,” Nicke says, exasperated.

“You did,” Andre says. “I thought you would never come back.” There’s a hint of genuine sadness, under Andre’s performatively dramatic complaining, and Nicke feels a stab of guilt. He didn’t intend to upset anyone. He just hadn’t been able to face dealing with everything happening so quickly, with the way things are rapidly coming to a head. The thread he’s been letting out over the past half-year has suddenly snapped taut, and all the little ways Nicke has let his existence bleed between life and death are much heavier, in sum, than he expected.

It did not feel so heavy, to take the flower from Alex’s hand, to go about the kingdom in his company, to start accepting gifts from his people, to nurture a little seedling here, to fall asleep here, to attend the feasts, to even, although not until safely back aboveground, eat strawberries grown in this land. Each step felt like only another bead sliding onto a thread, inevitable, ordered, settling into place.

But now Nicke is left wrapped in restraints of his own making, tied to this land by what he has touched and seen and done and, most inevitably, felt, and it is heavy indeed. Still, Nicke thinks, tapping the arm of the chair contemplatively, there are worse things to bear, than weight.

“I’ll always come back,” Nicke says, quietly, another bead.

“Good,” Andre says. “I’ve decided what I want.”

Nicke rolls his eyes. “Oh, well if _you’ve_ decided.”

“I want a flower crown,” Andre says. “Real flowers, like the ones that grow up above.”

“You'll have to take that up with Sasha.”

“No,” Andre says smugly, “_you’ll_ have to take that up with Sasha.”

“Fine,” Nicke sighs. “I’ll ask him, but if he says no you’re going to have to settle for one of your manicure sets back.”

“I want you to use them.” Andre glares at his old nemesis, Nicke’s cuticles, and Nicke rolls his eyes again.

“I’m not getting involved with this shit again,” Sasha says, when Nicke asks him. “Go bother Alex.”

“I’ve already wasted half the day tracking you down,” Nicke grumbles.

“This is like the second place we looked,” Andre says. Nicke shoves him, partly because he’s being annoying and partly because Andre is right in the path of a falling wrench.

“Sorry,” Evgeny yells down at them. He’s on an extremely rickety looking scaffolding, doing something to the observatory clock. “Can you throw that back up? I need it.”

“Don’t throw things at my clock,” Dima says, grabbing the wrench from Andre.

“Can’t you just do the flowers now?” Andre whispers to Nicke, while Dima and Sasha are apparently distracted arguing about which of them is stuck climbing the scaffolding to return Evgeny’s wrench.

“No,” Sasha says, jabbing a finger at Andre to make it clear he’s talking to him. Andre jumps a little and steps partly behind Nicke. “Go ask Alex,” he says to Nicke, with a dismissive wave.

At this point, they’ve gained a small but persistent audience. Nicke isn’t sure if it’s because of his return or because of the potential for flowers, but either way he’s not exactly thrilled with the idea of making such a request of Alex publicly.

“How do I keep getting into these situations,” Nicke grumbles to himself, as Andre drags him off toward the palace.

Alex, fortunately, is in his receiving room and seems happy enough to accept visitors. He seats them all, offering around a platter of tea and cakes that everyone, save Nicke, accepts.

“What can I do for you today?” Alex says courteously, looking at Nicke. It is, at first, a polite look. A magnanimous look, for company, albeit with the undercurrent of soft warmth that is never entirely absent from Alex’s face, when he looks at Nicke. Alex’s eyes catch, though, on the peek of gold chain in the opening of Nicke’s tunic, drag down to where the garnet rests, hidden by his shirt, and his look is no longer so polite. His eyes are flint, and Nicke a match, and the air between them catches fire as if is tinder.

Andre is saying something, Nicke realizes after a few seconds. He wrenches his attention away from Alex, with considerable effort, and refocuses on the matter at hand.

“-and that’s why you should let Nicke give me flowers,” Andre says.

“Right,” Alex says. “So what was it you wanted?”

Andre sighs at their inattention, but seems to decide that overt impertinence isn’t the way to get what he wants. He re-explains: Nicke’s absence, the idea for the flowers, his argument that it’s not that big a deal, really, and therefore should be allowed.

“I see.” Alex looks over at Nicke, thoughtful. _You know, what it is you’re asking?_ Alex’s eyes say, and Nicke does. This is yet another putting down of roots, another place that will ache if he decides, ultimately, to wrench them up. Not just for Nicke, but for everyone here. For Alex.

Nicke knows, too, even before they entered the palace, that this is what Alex would do, how he would respond. He lays the choice in Nicke’s hands, the capacity to hurt, the capacity to anchor, the capacity to pull away.

Nicke nods, very slightly, and Alex smiles.

“Well then,” he says. “Let’s see some flowers.”

Word has spread quickly, and there is quite the crowd gathered in the foyer, with more still spilling across the bridge and climbing up the hill to the palace.

“What do you need?” Andre asks eagerly. “Soil? Water? Something that you can change?”

“For flowers? Nothing,” Nicke says, with a little smile. He climbs halfway up the grand staircase, sitting down and letting Andre settle in on the stair below him.

Nicke, perhaps, adds more drama to the occasion than a simple creation of flowers really merits, but the absolute awe in the faces below him is intoxicating. He tugs loose one of the small wispy hairs from the curl behind his ear, rolling it in a tiny ball between his fingers until it transforms into a seed. Andre has turned around to watch at this point, craning his neck, and he grabs Nicke’s hand to look at the seed.

Nicke lets him, then tugs his hand loose to hold up the seed so the crowd can see it. He tucks it into the center of his palm and breathes over it, sprouting it into a tiny seedling. As the first flower blooms from a long, trailing stem, the utter silence of the foyer is broken by a chorus of gasps. Nicke bites down on a smile. Andre’s eyes are so wide they look like dinner plates.

Nicke decides, on the fly, that simply creating the crown in one go is not entertaining enough. Instead, he creates a series of long-stemmed primroses, braiding them quickly together into a crown.

“There you go,” Nicke says, placing it gently onto Andre’s head as the audience bursts into thunderous applause. Andre looks thrilled, and rather as if he thinks everyone is clapping for him. Nicke looks down at the crowd, finding Alex automatically. He’s on the sidelines, half-shadowed by one of the huge support columns. Nicke cannot see his expression.

Nicke lets Andre and the flowers absorb the attention of the remainder as the crowd starts to disperse, weaving his way through the room to stand by Alex.

They are not alone, or unwatched, even though most people are focused on getting a chance to touch or see the flowers more closely, so Nicke does not linger.

“I’ll be back tonight,” he says, soft enough that only Alex can hear. “Wait for me in the library.”

Alex nods, and Nicke goes to retrieve Andre. He has a few more apologies to make, and those will be easier with Andre coming along.

—-

It’s late, by the time Nicke has made the rounds of the city, spoken to all his friends and acquaintance, and stopped by the tavern to greet the crowd there. He’s tired, worn out on people, and would almost consider going right home if he hadn’t promised Alex he would come by the palace.

Almost.

Alex is in the library when he arrives, fire already started and Nicke’s chair in its usual place. A soft white throw is laid over the back of it, and Alex is in the chair opposite reading. He looks up when Nicke steps into the library, setting his book aside and standing to greet him. Nicke pulls the door closed behind him, softly, and goes to warm his hands by the fire.

“Things go well?” Alex asks. He doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with himself, unwilling to return to his seat but not stepping any closer.

“Yes,” Nicke says. “Thank you, for the flowers. That made things easier.”

Alex breathes in, long and slow. “Of course.”

Nicke’s head aches from the length of the day, the weight of his hair. He pulls carefully at Evgeny’s butterfly combs, taking them out slowly, piece by piece. He crosses to the table by Alex’s chair, sets them down on top of the book in a neat little line. When Nicke looks at him, Alex is still standing in the same place by the fire, still as a statue.

“How was your day?” Nicke asks, starting to unpin his coronet. His fingers are quick, the set of actions familiar, and it is the work of a moment to have all the pins out and his braid dropping long and heavy down his back. He takes less care with the ordinary pins, leaving them scattered in a small pile on the table. Nicke closes his eyes, sighing with relief as his headache starts to dissipate, pent up power flowing down from his scalp and leaving him tingling and warm.

Alex has still not replied, and when Nicke opens his eyes Alex is staring at him with naked, unconcealed hunger.

_Good,_ Nicke thinks. He walks back over to the fire, back to where he started, letting Alex watch him. Like this, they are less than a foot apart. Alex could reach out and touch him, if he wanted to.

“It was fine,” Alex says finally, and his voice shakes.

Nicke watches the fire, the leaping, ravenous light of it, the way it flickers and dances behind the screen. He lets Alex wait another moment, two, five, to see what he will do. When he looks back, Alex is still watching him, and everything is still written plainly across his face, and Nicke feels something loosen in himself. An unclasping, a tightness in his chest that he has carried for so long he has almost stopped noticing it.

Nicke steps a little closer, slowly, pressing the distance between them down to its smallest point, a mere few inches. He can feel Alex’s breath, the warmth of him, that strange impossible-to-explain sensation of another being so close. So close, but not touching, not yet.

“Why do you never touch me?” Nicke says, the distance between them so small that he needs to tilt his head a little, to meet Alex’s eyes.

“It is not a virtue of death,” Alex says, “to let things go. Once someone comes under my dominion, they do not leave. Not ever.”

“Is that what you want,” Nicke asks, swaying a little closer. “Me, under your dominion.”

“No,” Alex says, after a moment of silence. Nicke, very slowly, lays a fingertip on the pulse in Alex’s throat, fluttering under his skin like a trapped butterfly.

“Good,” Nicke whispers, breath right against Alex’s ear, and a shiver runs through Alex. Nicke steps away, noting how Alex’s body tries to follow him before Alex jerks himself back into stillness. Nicke goes over to where he left his bag, bending to retrieve a roll of brushes and combs from it. There is a low-backed settee that he thinks will work for his purposes. It is less close to the fire than the chairs, but still warm and well lit. Nicke sits, pulling his braid back over his shoulder. “You said,” Nicke says, “you would never touch my hair, if I didn’t want you to.” Alex gives him a jerky nod. “What if I wanted you to?”

“You don’t have to do this,” Alex rasps, taking a few, careful steps toward Nicke.

“I know,” Nicke says. He toys with the end of his braid. “Do you want to brush it out for me?”

“Yes,” Alex says. He still moves slowly, as if he’s afraid Nicke will startle and run away, and Nicke tilts his head back to smile up at him. Alex touches the side of his face, so gentle Nicke can barely feel it, and then moves to stand behind him.

Nicke was not certain of this offer, not until he started to make it, but when he pulls the tie from the end of his braid, all he feels is relief.

He sits in front of the fire, hair streaming back over his shoulders and pooling on the floor. Alex lays out the combs and brushes carefully, methodically. Alex’s hands shake, and he touches Nicke with a reverent gentleness, fingers combing through Nicke’s hair and undoing his braid.

It feels strange, entirely new, Alex’s hands in his hair. So much of Nicke’s magic is loose in the air, unbound, breathing and moving freely. The buzz of first contact, building slowly, gathering between them like static electricity, so potent that Nicke half expects his hair to stand on end. The amount of power Alex has in his hands, the clarity of direct connection between them, it makes the air shimmer and wave.

Nicke closes his eyes against it, dizzy, and when he opens them again he is somewhere else. Someone else.

The angle is different, the throne at his back, but Nicke knows right away that he is in the coronation scene, from the mural. The crowd in front of him is silent, frozen, and Nicke feels as if he is in some strange, submerged moment entirely outside of time. The clothes are the same, the scepter, the crown, the black-and-gold tunic with the thick belt cinching it in at the waist. Nicke turns, looking behind him, and there is Alex, cloaked in warm furs and crowned in stars.

Alex is not frozen, Nicke doesn’t think, but before he can do more than look back at Nicke the vision is dissipating and they are back in the library. Nicke jolts a little, startled by the sudden return to his own body, and Alex’s hand settles, warm and reassuring, on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Alex asks.

“Just…surprised,” Nicke says. He tilts his head back, fighting the urge to giggle at Alex upside-down. He feels so strange, fizzy and light, like he’s drunk, or happy. “Did you see that, too?”

“Yes,” Alex says. Nicke leans back against him, letting Alex support his weight. he twines one of Nicke’s curls around his finger. “You have a lot of magic.”

Nicke laughs. “So do you,” he points out. He can still feel it, although now that he’s starting to adjust its less overwhelming, less something he’s immediately lost in. It’s like that first moment, when Alex created the bangle, but attenuated, thin and beaten into gold.

Alex lets him adjust, stands there patiently while Nicke closes his eyes and settles back into the library, the warmth of the fire, Alex’s hands in his hair. And then he sits up, and Alex finishes brushing his hair out.

They don’t talk any more, but it is a deeply comfortable silence. As tired as Nicke is, when Alex sets the brushes down, he is a little sad to have it over. He wants to sink directly into bed, still surrounded by the smell of books and the warmth of the fire, and Alex, steady and comforting at his back.

Alex comes around the settee, kneeling at Nicke’s feet and taking his hands. “You’re tired,” he says.

“Yes.” Nicke stifles a yawn. He feels heavy, and slow, and safe, and the idea of walking all the way home is exhausting.

“Sleep,” Alex says. “I’ll get you a blanket, and something soft to wear.”

Nicke thinks about refusing. There are reasons, why it is more sensible to go home, but they feel very distant, and have little pull. Nicke is tired of trying not to want things; to want happiness, to want Alex.

So he nods, and tucks his legs up under him, and lets himself drift.

—-

When Nicke wakes up, there is a fresh suit of clothes folded neatly next to his clothes from the night before. He examines them curiously. They do not look familiar, but when he puts them on they fit perfectly. It is not, necessarily, something Nicke would have chosen for himself. He tends to go for comfort over style, and the intricately embroidered flowers spread over almost the entire back of the dark velvet green tunic. The sleeves are medium length and edged in gold, and it comes with an almost absurdly delicate pair of lace-up sandals.

Still, it is comfortable enough, the fabric soft and warm, while also letting him move about with ease, so Nicke counts himself satisfied. He folds up the borrowed nightshirt and sits on the settee again to brush his hair.

A light knock comes at the door a few minutes later.

“Come in,” Nicke calls. He hears the door open, and something being set down, and then Alex appears around the edge of the settee.

“Good morning,” Alex says. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Nicke says. “Sit, please. I’m nearly finished.”

Alex pulls up a chair, and Nicke sets aside his brush and braids his hair quickly. He does not bother pinning it up, just gets it more or less out of the way. Alex hasn’t said anything more by the time Nicke is tying off his braid; he seems content just to watch, and wait.

“I should go home,” Nicke says, reluctantly. It’s harder, somehow, leaving in the morning.

“I can walk you to the gate, if you like.”

“That would be nice,” Nicke says, smiling a little.

Alex stands, holding out a hand. Nicke takes it, letting Alex help him to his feet. Alex tucks Nicke’s hand in the curve of his arm carefully, and Nicke fights the urge to lean into him.

Alex stops, partway to the door, and Nicke turns a questioning look on him. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, just,” Alex laughs, a little self-consciously. “Here.”

He leads Nicke over to the silver platter, bare this time, and turned on its back so the butterfly is visible. Nicke picks it up, turning it over in his hands, uncertain what point Alex is making with this. It is light, strangely light, for something around which so much weight has accumulated. Nicke traces a finger over the engraving, the lines so fine he can barely feel them.

“There’s nothing on it,” Nicke says, finally, setting it down.

“Not today,” Alex says. “There will be again, tomorrow. You know what that means?”

Nicke looks up at Alex, considering. The platter, or more accurately, the food of the underworld, this has been the background and the subtext of their every meeting, but they have never spoken about it. Not this directly, this specifically. Not just what it means, in theory, but what it means, in particular, for Nicke. For Alex. “It means me staying,” Nicke says, finally.

“Yes.” Alex looks down, at Nicke’s hands on the platter. “That one is mine, you know.”

“Oh?” Nicke asks, still uncertain what Alex means. All of this is his.

“The golden one, it belongs to the palace. That one,” Alex, very carefully touches the edge of the butterfly’s wing, “is newer. I had it made.” Alex looks up at Nicke. “For you,” he adds.

“Oh.” Nicke’s throat is dry, and it comes out hoarse.

“I don’t feel trapped, Nicke. I want you to know that. Not by this, and not by you.”

Alex is still looking right at him, and Nicke feels pinned, skewered, his heart fluttering madly in his throat. He doesn’t know what to say to this, this declaration. He feels undone by Alex’s vulnerability, the completeness of his certainty.

Nicke does not feel certain of anything, and this, when he can still feel Alex’s hand in his, the ghost of touch glowing and settling warm under his skin, is too much. It’s too much, with Alex still at arms length and looking at Nicke like this, like he is laying himself at Nicke’s feet.

“I-” Alex begins, and Nicke closes the distance between them, and kisses him.

Alex is startled, his mouth still half-open, his lips soft, and Nicke pulls back after a second, embarrassed. “Sorry,” Nicke says “I shouldn’t-” Alex kisses him, and Nicke sighs against his mouth, half-relief and half-longing. It’s a gentle kiss, sweet, and it makes Nicke ache. His hand drifts up to Alex’s cheek and Alex goes still, as soon as Nicke touches him.

“What’s wrong?” Nicke asks, still close enough that he can feel Alex breathe. Alex shudders, resting his forehead against Nicke’s.

“Nothing,” he says. And then, “I keep thinking you’ll dissolve into air, if I touch you.”

“I won’t,” Nicke says, and kisses him again.

—-

Nicke goes to the store and looks at the pomegranates, takes one home and cuts it up.

He eats the whole thing, seed by seed, standing at the counter and staring at the splash of crimson across the cutting board.

In the end, Nicke finds, it’s an easy decision to make, to take that last, final step downward. The distance has gotten so small that it is not such a frightening leap, saying yes. He thought he would feel conflicted, but in the end he just feels settled, and ready for the change.

Nicke thinks about doing it publicly, a repeat of the feast incident with a different ending. He’s standing in his kitchen, and the seeds burst sweet and ripe over his tongue, better than anything he’s ever tasted, as he pictures it. The eyes of the entire hall on him, and Alex, passing him the platter. He would tell Alex beforehand, would want to see the anticipation on his face, the hunger.

That is why he decides against it, for all its logical elegance, its suitability as an ending. He wants Alex’s reaction to himself. He wants to watch Alex feed him, catalogue every flicker of expression that crosses his face. He wants to be utterly and completely focused on Alex: Alex’s eyes on his, Alex’s steady capable hands, the rough splendor of him in supplication. He wants Alex’s hunger, and the satiation of it, to be his alone.

These things decided, Nicke discards the rind, washes the cutting board and the knife, puts them away. He will need some time, to set things in order here, but he will tell Alex of his decision tomorrow.

Then, he thinks, a few days of sunlight, a storing up for the time below. The rest will keep, until after.

—-

“Ready?” Sasha asks. Nicke glances over at him. Sasha looks at home in the gloaming: half shadow, half light.

“Yes,” Nicke says. He tilts his face up, catching the last few rays of sun as it sinks below the horizon. He breathes in, deep, letting the wind and the cold and the smell of grass-even in winter, struggling up through the snow to brush against his ankles-sink into his lungs, his bones, his wrists and the back of his neck. To become a settled thing, stored up and sealed inside him, preserved.

They wind their way through the cemetery, into the northwest corner, past the yew tree, to the stone arch. Nicke takes one final look up at the sky, fixing it in his memory. He unwinds his scarf and drops it, along with his heavy coat and thick boots. He will not need them, where he is going. Down to his tunic and with his feet bare, Nicke steps through the arch.

They go down the long passage underground, across the water to the far shore. Sergei, at the gate, smiles at Nicke.

“Don’t forget to come back and visit me sometimes,” he says.

And then they are in the city. Although it’s late the streets are full, crowds of people with lamps and candles in the dim of the golden sky. They are all waiting for him, silent and watching, lining the path to the palace.

Nicke, clad in a flowing white tunic cinched by a golden belt, with the garnet at his throat and his hair pinned into a coronet, walks beside Sasha. He does not stop to speak to anyone, although he does roll his eyes and nod to an enthusiastically waving Andre.

They reach the palace hill, weaving up the side with its pretty little terraces, over the long thin bridge, and finally into the palace itself.

Alex is waiting for him on the steps, dressed in unrelieved black.

“Good luck,” Sasha says. He grins at Nicke. “Try not to break him.” Alex hisses and smacks his arm, and Nicke laughs.

Alex closes the palace doors behind them, with careful formality, and then they are alone. Nicke feels an odd surge of nerves, but then Alex looks at him and smiles, the soft, happy one that belongs to Nicke alone, and the nerves dissipate.

“I’ve missed you, the past few days,” Nicke says. Alex takes his hand, pressing a kiss to the knuckles.

“Me, too,” he says. “Come, I have the library ready for us.”

Nicke takes his arm, letting Alex lead him upstairs. The fire is set and the library is warm and comfortable. Their chairs have been pushed aside, and a soft, rose-colored blanket is spread in front of the fire.

“A picnic?” Nicke asks, noting the large wicker baskets overflowing with food.

“I thought that would be nice,” Alex says, “but I can bring in a table if you prefer.”

“This is perfect.” Nicke sinks cross-legged onto the blanket and Alex settles next to him. “Do you mind?” Nicke asks, starting to unpin his hair.

“Not at all,” Alex says. He reaches out, gently tucking a loose curl behind Nicke’s ear.

Now that its just him and Alex, Nicke lets his hair down completely, unfastens his belt, letting himself breathe out fully. There are a few fat cushions scattered around the blanket, and Nicke leans back on one, watching Alex set out the food around them. There is a lot of it, much more than the two of them can eat in one sitting, and Nicke wants to tease Alex about it, a little. He’s touched, though, by the careful attention to detail, the variety, how many options Alex has provided, all with the aim of pleasing Nicke, and he can’t quite bring himself to even playful mockery.

“Something to drink?” Alex asks, and pours them champagne at Nicke’s nod. The goblet is a heavy gold encrusted with garnets, and Nicke holds it up to the light before drinking, fascinated by the flash of the fire across the facets of the gems. He hands it to Alex, letting him drink as well.

Some time in the middle, maybe when their hands brush over the stem of the goblet, maybe when Alex drinks from the same place Nicke’s lips just touched, maybe when Nicke’s eyes catch on the lines of Alex’s throat swallowing around the wine, time slows down again.

Alex sets the goblet aside. Nicke kisses him, slow and careful, and then, when Alex’s mouth opens under his, greedy, following the taste of champagne down until it’s just Alex.

Nicke pulls back after a moment, and Alex sways and half-follows him. His mouth is red, and tempting, but there is a proper order to things, here, and Nicke is determined to follow them.

“What do you have for me?” Nicke asks. Alex’s eyes slide open, slow, and Nicke has to kiss him again, press a hand to where Alex’s heart is beating against his chest.

There is so much food set out around them, and Nicke does not care much where they begin. Alex has laid some things on the silver platter, though, and that is as good a place to start as any. Nicke points to a flat dish of stew, rich dark brown save for the occasional red flash of pomegranate arils. Alex picks it up, fills the spoon carefully. He holds it up to Nicke’s lips and Nicke opens for him, lets Alex push into his mouth. Alex feeds him small pieces of a dense brown bread, next, watching how Nicke’s lips catch at his fingers. He pauses, hands empty, and lets his thumb fall against the dip in Nicke’s lower lip.

Nicke looks at him from under his lashes, tilting his head just slightly so his hair spills forward over his shoulder. Alex’s eyes on him are addictive, the intensity of his attention, the way he watches Nicke’s smallest motion. They are caught, now, on Nicke’s mouth.

“You’re so beautiful, like this,” Alex says, soft. He drops his hand down, palm sliding firebright over Nicke’s hair, and leans in to drop a gentle kiss on Nicke’s lips. “So beautiful always,” Alex says, still close enough that Nicke can feel the vibration, and Nicke wants so much, so much.

Alex feeds him a few bites of a root vegetable scramble and then pauses, watching his hands as he shells a few peanuts.

“What is it?” Nicke asks, when Alex does not look back up. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Alex says, but he still looks pensive. “I wanted to ask,” he says, after another little pause, “about the strawberries.”

“Oh.” Alex does not look upset, or angry, and anyway Nicke does not expect some kind of admonition from him, especially not after everything else that has happened. Alex did not seem to mark the incident with the strawberries much more than anything else between them, although Nicke supposes with what came after they didn’t really have time to talk about it. “What about the strawberries?”

“What do you need? To grow them.”

_Ah,_ Nicke thinks, as Alex looks up at him, still a little shy, and Nicke pretends he does not know where Alex is going with this. He finds that he wants, very much, to make Alex ask. “Some earth,” Nicke says, “and time.”

“Oh,” Alex says, sounding disappointed. Nicke leans to the side, picking through one of the baskets. There are some little radishes that will do nicely.

“If I have something of a similar nature, I can change it,” Nicke says, tone merely observational. He picks up one of the radishes, biting into it. Nicke is not very good at playing coy, but Alex is easy to wind up about these things: Nicke’s magic, Nicke’s hair, Nicke. Nicke does not think he will ever tire of this feeling, of Alex’s eyes on him in the space between desire and fulfillment.

Alex lays Nicke’s hand out on his own, picks up one of the radishes and tucks it in Nicke’s. He closes their hands around it, gentle, and looks up at Nicke.

Nicke raises an eyebrow. _What do you want from me?_

“Please,” Alex says, like he is laying the word at Nicke’s feet, and Nicke would give him anything, just for the tilt of his head. Just for the way he looks, like he will take denial and be grateful, if only it comes from Nicke’s mouth.

“Close your eyes,” Nicke says, and pulls his hand free. Alex tilts his face up, his eyes fluttering shut, obedient. Nicke takes longer than he needs to, piling the radishes turned strawberries into his lap, greedy with how still Alex is, how trusting. “Open your mouth.”

Nicke rests the tip of the strawberry against Alex’s bottom lip and makes him wait a little longer, relishing the visible shiver of anticipation. Finally, he lifts and presses in, feeding it to him slowly. He watches Alex’s jaw work, his throat as he swallows. Nicke feeds him another, a third, cataloguing the play of expression across his face. “Open your eyes,” Nicke says, because he wants to see that, too, and almost crushes the strawberry in his hand when Alex complies. Nicke feeds him a fourth strawberry, and a fifth, and thinks about putting his hands all over. He wants to feel the motion of Alex’s throat against his hands, his lips.

Alex is careful, but he misses a drop of juice; it slips from his lips, slides down his chin, and Nicke cannot resist any longer. He licks the juice from Alex’s skin, and then Alex’s mouth is there, open and wanting, and he tastes of strawberries and Nicke’s magic.

The food has been eaten, and Nicke has waited so long for this. Ever since Alex first touched him, that night with the necklace, and his hair, he can’t stop thinking about it. Alex’s hands all over him. Himself, laid bare and open for Alex to feast upon, devour.

And so he’s kissing Alex, and his hair is cloaking them, and Alex’s hands are running over him still so light, so light, and Nicke nips at his lip, sharp, and Alex jerks and shudders under him.

Nicke pulls back. “What did I say,” he says, low and firm. “I’m not going to dissolve if you touch me.”

Alex takes a deep breath, letting his hands settle on Nicke’s waist, his back. “I don’t know where to start,” he says, and leans in closer. He buries his face against Nicke’s neck, presses a brief kiss to his collarbone. Nicke strokes his hair, running his fingers through it.

“Start wherever you like,” Nicke says. Alex makes a desperate, pleading noise against Nicke’s neck, his hands tightening.

“The rest I could practice,” Alex says, and his mouth right against Nicke’s pulse is distracting. Nicke forces his slow, heavy thoughts out of the way, tries to focus on what Alex is saying. “The dressing of your hair, what clothes you like, how to lace your shoes, how to guide you from place to place so that you can see the best the kingdom has to offer.” Alex’s hands clasp Nicke’s waist; he presses kisses in a little line on Nicke’s neck: one, two, three. “That I was prepared for. This, I have no experience with. I do not want to disappoint you.”

Nicke pulls Alex’s head back far enough that Alex can see his face, not harshly but firm. “Do I look like someone who chooses disappointments?” he asks.

—-

It’s not funny. Alex would laugh, normally, but the way Nicke is looking at him, fierce and certain, and like he would rip the still-beating heart from a bear, if it opposed him, it’s not funny.

Alex feels something well in his throat, like the strawberries have rooted, bloomed. Like Nicke is cracking him open from the inside, and all he can think of is how beautiful that will be, himself splayed open, because Nicke’s hands have done it.

He kisses Nicke’s hands, slowly, one by one, feels the little shock of it, the lifeblood in his fingertips, the strength of his knuckles. Rough hands, and the finest he has ever touched, that bear up what is broken down, that make new. And then, the bones of his wrist, the tendons in his arms. Nicke lets him, when Alex moves, briefly to his mouth, alighting, down to his throat, the long line of it. The sting of his hair on Alex’s mouth, his hands, spilling behind Nicke like a bed of spun red-gold, spurs Alex on.

“Can I?” Alex asks, and Nicke nods. He unlaces Nicke’s tunic with reverent hands, nearly undone with the way it slips loose down Nicke’s shoulder. He has to stop, kiss the newly revealed shoulder, bite gently at a spot that makes Nicke shiver.

He pulls the tunic off, and Nicke is entirely bare underneath, and Alex has never seen the sun but he thinks it is something like this. So bright, and so staggering, drawing you leaping to your own annihilation, the beauty of something that can destroy you without breaking stride, the need to prostrate yourself and worship.

He wants so much, he cannot imagine every coming to the end of it, and Nicke lies back, and smiles, and pulls Alex on top of him.

Nicke’s hair is under them, and Alex is still in his too-confining regalia, and Nicke hitches a leg around the back of Alex’s, and Alex loses everything but the feeling of it: Nicke’s mouth, the soft delicacy of the skin just above his waist, still pink from the tightness of the belt, Nicke’s arms around him, hands on his back, Nicke rocking slowly underneath him, just pressing them together, inexorable.

Alex is breathing too hard to keep kissing him, dizzy with it, and once Nicke is no longer stopping his mouth he cannot keep quiet. He sounds wounded with it, desperate, crooning, trapped and uncomfortable in his pants and still so lit up with the feel of Nicke that-

He needs to stop, rolling off Nicke and onto his back, pressing a hand against his mouth and clutching hard at the blanket so he does not immediately touch.

“What’s wrong?” Nicke sits up, frowning, flushed pink from Alex’s mouth and hands, his hair forming a curtain around the two of them again, protective, and Alex would give him anything, anything.

“I want this to be good for you,” he says, on his back and looking up at Nicke. “I want to be good for you.”

“You’re always good,” Nicke says, but he’s still frowning. “Alex,” he says slowly. “You know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. You don’t have to…to sleep with me, if you don’t want.”

“I know,” Alex says, and Nicke’s frown eases slightly. “I do want.” The rest tangles on his tongue, thick. He can’t stop thinking about it, especially the past few days. He used to try to be careful, to not let himself hope too much. But all that ended up meaning is Nicke creeping into his dreams, his waking fantasies. “I want everything with you.”

“Oh,” Nicke says. And he sounds like Nicke, flat and expressionless, but he looks at Alex like Alex is under his mouth already.

“Show me how to touch you,” Alex asks, quietly, so Nicke does.

He guides Alex across his body slowly: his nipples, the skin of his waist, his thighs, his hands, the backs of his knees. And then, finally.

After Nicke comes, he is long and loose, lax against the blanket, and he lets Alex kiss him again all over, softly.

“Take your clothes off,” Nicke says.

And when that is accomplished, Nicke puts hands on Alex, slow and light and teasing, and Alex can’t think about anything else. He only half hears what Nicke says, “I think you’d like the wait but you’ve been patient enough.”

And then Nicke’s mouth is on him, hair falling around him, looking up at Alex from under his lashes, and Alex shakes and arch-presses himself into the ground, desperate, not wanting to push up into Nicke uninvited.

Nicke pulls back and tells Alex to come for him, and then, chin tucked into the heaving of Alex’s belly, he kisses it once, slow and lingering, bites hard at his hipbone, and then goes back.

Nicke swallows around him, and pulls off with a sleepy satisfaction, and Alex nearly tackles him with the need to kiss him again.

Nicke’s skin is so soft, the warmth of him, the luxury of his mouth, and Alex settles against him and rests, finally.

**Author's Note:**

> No idea how this ended up exactly 33k. Witch powers manifest.


End file.
